City Government - Regular Meeting

Good evening, call to order. Welcome to the Laramie City Council work session for Tuesday, July 14, 2026. And we will begin this work session with public comment on non-agenda items. Good evening, Sarah.

Mayor Cumbie and city council members, Sarah Brown-Matthews. Oh, sorry. Mayor Cumbie and city council members, Sarah Brown-Matthews. I'm here just to say what a difference Blair me has now because of the support that you've given to the pilot hill project. And I wanted to be sure that each of you were aware that we are having a big celebration. We really want to get together with the community and applaud and dance in the dirt and celebrate all that we've accomplished over the last several years. I put a progress report in your packets and on the back of it is an invitation to our event. It's Wednesday, the 22nd of July from 5.30 in the evening until 8.30. We have a great band coming, lots of good barbecue food, so I hope that if at all possible you'll join us. We will be also recognizing all the different partners and supporters to this project and to our trail system project, so definitely we'll be bringing up City Council and the City of Laramie as a key partner in this project. That's it for tonight. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to it. Thank you, sir. Tom Matamor.

Honorable Mayor, Councilors, thank you. Just to let you know, the Rifle Range is having an open day on July 29th, Sunday, July 29th. We will have a youth competition shoot on the 22 Range, followed by our annual meeting and barbecue, and you're all invited to come.

What time is it?

We open for the competition at 8. We will close all the rainfall shooting at noon and we'll probably start serving food about 12.30. Thank you.

Thank you, Tom. Any other public comment on non-agenda items? Seeing none, We will begin our work session redevelopment codes. Director Tini.

You're fine. Okay, we'll see if it works here. Let's see. Oh, maybe. I don't know. Is it working? There we go. Cool. All right. All right, council, good evening. I'm going to spend some time today kind of just going through a little bit of, I'm going to call it some education on the redevelopment process that we currently follow in Laramie. I'm gonna kind of spend a little bit of time talking about just kind of some things we're observing, right? And this work session kind of came out of some just inquiries from council and it's just a common thing that we actually talk a lot about in our office is how do sites in Laramie specifically, we're not really talking about a new brand new project just developing. We're talking about sites that already exist in some fashion, wanting to do something more, change, modify. That's kind of really what the focus is tonight. I'm gonna, like I said, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna first give you a little bit of history. I'm gonna talk a little bit about pre-2010 redevelopment process. The key with that date, it's the pre-development code, the code that we currently have today. I'm gonna talk a little bit about immediately post-2010, so the development code that we have today and what we adopted, what council considered and adopted. Then what's happened since 2010 to 2026? Where have we made changes? Then what I'm going to do is hit some of the real big high points of redevelopment. These are the things that we talk about the most, that we know are parts of the development process that are discussed and either are things that the property owner or the community or the staff recognizes. These are the things that the development has to do or address in order to do whatever they want to do. And then, like I said at the end, I'm going to kind of talk through issues and just kind of considerations related to those topics to try to kind of bring us back to kind of full circle a little bit in terms of these topics. We can wait.

Well, right now it shows the preview. on the screen that we normally use. They put in an additional screen and I have to change it background setting in order to get it to. I'm printing some packets though that I'm gonna distribute here.

Oh, I just- Councillor O'Doherty. Sorry. The distinction when you said that the thing is already there. Well, the land is always there. So are you gonna clarify redevelopment versus like from scratch development? The difference, what you're... Yeah, thanks.

Mayor, council member, yeah, mostly what we're talking about is not what I would call greenfield development. So if the property's there and someone is starting from scratch, there's nothing there. That's not really what today is about. It's more about everything else, okay? So... Let's jump in and start talking a little bit about pre-2010 redevelopment process. For those of you that don't know, all of our development code were found in three separate titles. If you wanted to do a project in Laramie, you essentially had to go through these three different sections of code. hundreds of pages to figure out what you needed to do. Some of it was subdivision and dimensional standards like setbacks. Some of it was zoning and use-related type things, so what you could do in your zone. Then other things were like development standards. It was not unified. New development was pretty straightforward in the old code as far as greenfield development. Nothing on the property or ready to build a brand new restaurant or a brand new hotel. Redevelopment or expansion, so if you wanted to redo your restaurant and turn it into a shoe store or if you wanted to take your hotel and make it into an apartment complex. That was not very clear. I would say that generally the code didn't address those circumstances. And so what you were allowed to do is kind of do whatever you wanted once you had your initial development there. Now still you had to follow zoning, you couldn't put a use that wasn't permitted, but things like If you were to do an addition on a building, did that addition have to have a sidewalk connection? Did it have to add parking? Did it need to change modify landscaping? What if the new addition blocked the driveway or a fire access? Really, in all realities, there were no requirements in code that required that person to do anything. For things like maybe landscaping or something that you may feel like is not a life safety issue, not probably a big deal, but there were not steps put in place in the old code to allow us to require things like a drive access that was wide enough for a car. You could just kind of block it off and keep going, and if you met setbacks, there was limited things that we could do under our code. That is where we were at. Probably the other real large thing that I would point out when it came to redevelopment in our code pre-2010 was really the variance process was the only process available to us in terms of flexibility. Staff discretion was very limited in the old code. And I think to think about that whole process, The bigger thing for us under the old code is things like a traffic, like added traffic because of a building expanding. We really couldn't address that for the neighborhood. If there was a maybe needed screening or something was noisy, there was very limited things that we could do under the code to make that work. Pre-2010 too, in this chapter, we adopted a building code. That has been very consistent since the 70s. We used to have the uniform building code that was then taken over by the International Code Council, the ICC. So really, since the 70s, we've had a building code. And I'll touch a little bit on building code, but that's really not gonna be the focus of today's presentation. But I think what's important is that at that time we did have building code.

You're fine.

Councillor O'Doherty.

I always forget those acronyms. So Uniform Building Code and then International Code Council, ICC. Thank you. It's the heat.

Yeah.

You and the vice mayor, bitch.

I wasn't on that. That was close. I don't know. You're good. You're good. You're good. Are you good, Nancy? Do you want me to keep going or not? Just wait a second.

I'm going to go get a couple more printed packets for them. But other than that, you're good.

Okay. Okay. So... Now what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about post-2010. So following a comprehensive plan update, one of the main pieces that came out of the comprehensive plan update was development of what's called a unified development code. It's where all of your development regulations are found essentially in one chapter, one location. So as a developer, you pull open that chapter, you can go through the code and see what the city requires for whatever you're trying to do. During that time, the development code, which is just another chapter of municipal code, it was done by our consultants. Clarion was the consultants that did that. Those are the same ones that are working on our current comprehensive plan, if you want to know. And it was written, developed, and tailored to Laramie by citizens, developers, and contractors, and anyone else that was integral to kind of the development process. If you want to go back and look at some of the documents to see who is all involved, it's many names that you know today and citizens of this community. There's kind of always this misnomer that this was some sort of like off the shelf from Boulder, from Fort Collins, that is 100% not the case. There was something like 100 meetings done with people just to get drafts put together before the council planning commission. There was a whole steering committee where all they did was review code. So I think it's important to note. But here's the thing I want you to take away in 2010. There was a philosophical community shift. The shift was that the council directed us that properties in this community should be required to improve their site when expansion and changes occur, okay? That is what a lot of what you see in the development code was there for, is the community kind of said, we're no longer wanting to see just anything show up with no design standards, no landscaping standards, no parking standards, no emergency access standards, no standards for stacking for a drive-through. All those things that you see within the code today, those were kind of an impetus of that philosophical shift. I threw up a couple properties. I'll just tell you Walmart was one of the properties that started this conversation. You can go out there today, you can see the same lack of landscaping that's there. Does Walmart serve our community? Absolutely it does. That's not what I'm saying. there was a recognition that that's not really what our community wanted to see. And so codes and things like that were written to try to address that. We have metal buildings along Grand Avenue. That's not really what the community wanted to see. There's a lot of things within the whole development code that that was kind of the impetus. And so I point that out because I think that that helps kind of put a frame to this whole bigger conversation that I'll kind of talk about a little bit later. But I do want to note in the development code, there was a new process developed which was called the site plan process. That's what we know it as today. We actually had a different name early on. What that did is it took these things like we're talking about that are found in municipal code that are not building code out of the building permit process. Prior to this time, everything was supposed to be addressed by the contractor and by the building department. And that really, there was a lot of things that those two groups of people weren't familiar with. And so there was a separate process, which is, this is a common practice. This is how most communities do development. There's two processes. Like I said, all the development standards were in this one location, and there was administrative flexibility built into the process. We've had two processes installed, one's called alternative equivalent compliance, and another one's called minor administrative modification. I'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit, but two processes that gave staff the ability to provide flexibility on development. Once again, building code pretty much stayed the same. We still had a building code. It was now through the ICC because UBC had gone away. And so that really didn't change much.

All right.

Councilor Freed.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Director Tini. Just a question about administrative flexibility given in that point. I guess through alternative equivalent compliance, can you just give an example? Maybe that's like a broad term, but, um, yeah, I think one of the things that I've heard in my limited time on council is, you know, the city, city allowed this to happen on this person's property. That's kind of like the, the saying that I'll hear, you know, why did they do that? Or, um, and so, I mean, I think that being able to be flexible and finding solutions in town is, is good, but can you describe the kind of an example of what that would look like if you had one?

Mayor, Council Member Freed, if you wouldn't mind, I'm gonna talk about it a little bit later. Do you mind waiting? I don't mind. Okay. Thank you then. So just wait on baited breath as they say. So let's talk about 2010 to 2026. What I think, and I think that this is something that our community is a little bit unique with, but it's a good thing. We recognize that when the new code came out, that there was going to be growing pains and we were willing as a community to make changes. When we adopted the development code, we said it would kind of be this like living document and that we would bring forward changes and recommendations throughout its life to try to adapt to the things that are changing. Now we all know, I mean a lot's different since 2010 just in the way we run our life, businesses, uh, different types of uses. There's things that in 2010 we didn't even know would exist. that we have to contemplate and be prepared for. Those things all communities should be doing, but like I said, there was really what we found is that the site plan process at the time when we adopted was kind of an all or nothing option. And we realized that that was not working very well. And so very shortly thereafter, and then subsequent to that through the years, we've made some pretty significant changes. One, We have a development process that now has a type one, two, and three site plan. So think of those as just different levels of site plan intensity and requirements that come with that to try to figure out a right fit for the type of project that's going on. We modified all of our parking standards so that there was specific parking lot standards for remodeling a parking lot that's pre-existing and doesn't conform to our code. There's a whole section in code that's all it's about. We created some enlargement and modification thresholds. Remember the all or nothing comment? It was all or nothing. Now there's some thresholds in which you have to achieve before we actually start requiring things. Change of use requirements was another large change. That is to address when we have uses go from certain uses to something else that is different enough that there needs to be site changes for things like, just think like something that doesn't have a driveway or a drive-through, think like a coffee shop. You need space for those vehicles to stack so they don't block streets and things like that. Prior code just kind of had to hope it would work, but now we can make sure that like traffic or things like that still work for the site. We exempted interior changes, so Somebody is just doing some interior remodel. Let's say they're going to redo their whole restaurant inside. If they're not modifying the outside, then that doesn't trigger things like more parking or landscaping or things like that. Building codes still apply, but the other things wouldn't. And then, you know, really an extensive expansion of uses within the zoning districts across the city. That's come in multiple iterations, both in commercial zones, providing for a broader range of uses within the different zoning districts, as well as in our residential zones as well, for some of those things that are kind of accommodating for a neighborhood. So let's talk a little bit about the current development process. And I'm just going to kind of hit some of the high points. I mentioned before this idea of a type 1, type 2, and type 3 site plan. A type 1 site plan for us, we use that. It's kind of the site's generally remaining as is. except for some of those areas of change. Let's say they want to add a few parking spaces in their parking lot. That area will have to comply and have some requirements associated with it, but we're not going to require the rest of the parking lot to change. Maybe if they're going to modify an area and remove some landscaping, they may have to replace some landscaping elsewhere on site, but we're not making them fix the whole site and put additional landscaping in. For instance, if they're modifying the facade, let's say they add a small addition like a entryway to a business. The entryway will need to comply, but the whole building won't have to come into compliance in terms of like our materials or parking or landscaping. A type two site plan is kind of think of it as the middle of the road. It's to kind of accommodate kind of medium style changes. You know, this is a pretty complex in terms of it can cover a lot of different areas. So like think of a larger parking lot possible change. Maybe they need to do some drainage changes which might affect some parking and some landscaping and then maybe they have to do some things to the building. That's a lot of times where a site plan type two lands. Also with some use changes, What's typically required there is more things like perimeter landscaping or things adjacent to streets and roads. Those are the common triggers when we're generally talking about this. And then a type three site plan is full conformance. What that is is when a property does enough work on the site that we are saying, you've done enough, we're asking for the whole site to come into conformance. And that might mean modifying the parking lot and adding landscaping buffers or maybe modifying the building's facade. There could be a lot of areas that could possibly come into play there. So I'll kind of come back and talk a little bit about the site plan process and something we kind of commonly see. I'll say Type 1 site plans and Type 3 site plans are almost the majority of what we do. We actually don't have a lot of Type 2 site plans, which I'm going to talk a little bit more about later. Another large piece is this change of use concept. What we have is within our code. If someone, for instance, is going within the same use level. So let's say, and just if you're looking at this kind of chart on the side, let's say there's a financial service, so a bank, and they want to become now just an office building, that's really not going to trigger anything on our side of things. Now, if they want to modify the building or do some things like that, but if they just want to change the use, they really don't have to do anything for us. So no change when the use level is the same. When there's a use level of adjacent, so for instance, a six to a five or a three to a two, if you're looking at this, maybe let's say you have a childcare facility and you want to turn this into a doctor's office, you will be required to do some basic requirements, things like possibly some internal landscaping if you need to have more parking, for instance, for the new use, or perimeter landscaping around the street side. This is kind of once again, this is that middle of the road type two site plan. Then we have the kind of third level, which is a type three site plan when you have a use change of more than two uses. So for instance, a two to a four as I have here. So this would be a good example here is let's say you have a retail establishment, you're selling something and you want to turn it into a hotel. That will require the full site to come into conformance. depending upon the site, right? You can think of all these different properties in your head. It could mean a lot or it could mean a little. It just depends on the site. Also with uses, I think it's important to note that we do have a nonconformity section. Very common in most codes. Nonconformities, remember, are kind of built to have those uses go away. Long term, those uses can remain as is. They're allowed to continue to operate. They're not required to upgrade at a certain point or five years later, you can sell that non-conforming use to another person and as long as they keep running it that way, there's no requirements. But when things change, that's often when we see the non-conforming piece comes in and it is a much more strict section of code so that those things slowly come back into conformance with the zoning district or the uses or maybe site conformance depending upon what type of non-conformity it is. Thank you. I'll also point out we built into the code multi-tenant complexes. They are exempt except when you modify something. What's important about that is that allows for complexes, let's say they have 10 units in it and there's 10 different businesses in it. Those can go in and out in terms of the use. They can change use level, but they do have to still conform to the zoning requirements. If they're in the B1 zone, they have to be uses that are allowed in the B1 zone. Those are typically pretty common within a multi-tenant complex because there's walls and things and they move those things around and they sometimes combine the two units to make a bigger unit and so it provides logical flexibility. Oh, I didn't bring it.

I didn't mean to stop you, but Mike has... Vice Mayor, you have a question or comment?

I do. Thank you. Director Timmy, thank you very much for all of this. Can you share some examples of some non-conforming uses that we've seen in the past or that would be something we'd have on our radar?

Yes. Let me just give me a second here. I would say probably a common non-conforming use that we often have is a multi-tenant building that was created, let's say, in 1920 next to the university or something that might not be in the right zoning district. We see a little bit of that. Remember, Laramie is kind of unique. The core of our community allows for multifamily, so we don't see that in some places, whereas there are some other places. We definitely have a few business nonconformities where long-time established business is located at a spot. The zoning never was really... what was there, but it's just been there before the zoning was in place. You know, like an automobile shop. We have a few of those like in downtown, which would be a good example of that, where currently they're allowed to continue to operate. They can kind of keep doing their thing, but over time those would need or would be required to go away if they decide to shut down or want to make expansions or things like that. Oh, there you go. Well, we're hurting ourselves, Nancy, here. I'll also kind of quickly talk about uses just in this section. This is just a little snippet of our use table. And I had mentioned earlier about this expansion of uses. Under the old code, so pre-2010, it was a zoning practice called Euclidean zoning. And Euclidean zoning, all you can think of it as, think of it as like a pyramid. And as you build into the zoning districts that are more intense, more things are allowed. Pretty much what you had then was translated into this table. We have a pretty robust allowance of uses across zoning districts. Part of that I think is a philosophy of this community that we're willing to kind of allow things to kind of go places. And so I think some of the nonconformities that we run into are less over time because we have started to allow certain uses I think the most recent use change was some of our uses that we are allowing in like the R3 and R2 zoning districts things like coffee shops or small restaurants you know things that provide some services to a neighborhood that might be logical on a corner that maybe already has a commercial building from 1910 right like it's probably being used as a house now but could it be converted to a coffee shop sure could um and so i think it's important to note that at least in our community this table is fairly fairly expansive um i think that there's probably always i feel like we're always finding things within this section like where i'm like i could probably put this here i don't know if that's good We try to keep on top of that, and I think as a community we do a pretty good job of being flexible, but then also cautious about anything, anywhere. Next thing I want to talk about is enlargements and modifications. So first off, single family attached, detached, modular homes, and pretty much two family, duplex, or anything less than four units are exempted. So if you have a two unit and you want to make it a three unit, it doesn't really trigger anything in our code. Got to provide a parking space or a driveway, but you're not adding landscaping. You don't have to modify the building, things like that. Most of this stuff in terms of enlargement and modification fall into more of the commercial realm or think like a large apartment complex or something like that. Your main triggers are if you increase the number of stories of a building, increase the building size by 20% or 20,000 square feet, increase non-permeable lot coverage by more than 2,000 square feet. Remember, that's a little bit different than the first bullet. The reason for that is stormwater management and the effects of adjacent properties and what you do with that water when you make it impermeable. With those three things, basically, you would have a type three site plan. So you would be required to come into conformance with our code. Otherwise, you would fall in the type one or a type two site plan depending upon kind of what you're doing. Enlargements have to meet code. So, for instance, I kind of gave a couple examples. Let's say you're doing a parking lot and you add 20 more spaces, that whole new parking area is gonna have to comply with space sizes, landscaping, and things like that. Now, I'll say, 20 space is probably going to be more than 2000 square feet of impermeable surface. So you probably would trigger then the rest of this site being in conformance. But if it was small enough, possibly it would fall under that. Another example might be in addition to a building might have to comply with design requirements and ADA access. If you're over the 20% or 20,000 square feet, it means the whole building is going to have to come into conformance. Now, that's scaled, right? If you have a really large building and you do kind of a big addition for everybody else but not for your building, you might not trigger that. But it's kind of the threshold. There's a line drawn as far as when we want to see improvements. Nonconforming parking lots. I mentioned this earlier. We have a whole section on nonconforming parking lots. I don't have to point them out to you in this community. You know the parking lots that have been there forever, right? They're kind of a sea of asphalt. Maybe there's some sidewalk on the edge. Maybe there's an island or two. Those are considered non-conforming parking lots. Today our parking lots require some perimeter landscaping, require islands if it's big enough. And so there are things that you have to do. But what we found, and if you remember one of my slides, I kind of said, like, we have these growing pains. This was one of the first ones we identified that, like, we had to build some parameters in terms of some kind of steps or levels of improvement in which things would be required. And so that's what we did. So first off, minor repairs and maintenance are exempted. If you need to fix a drainage way or a valley pan, if you crack ceiling, you can even mill the whole parking lot and overlay it with a new set of asphalt or a new lift, as long as you don't go to the base, so you can't touch the base. You can crack seal, you can re-stripe, all that's exempted. If you have a non-conforming parking lot, you can do that a hundred times, we'll never talk to you again about that parking lot. However, if you need to reconstruct the parking lot, that's kind of where you get into this tiered system. So first off, let's talk about what reconstruction is. Reconstruction is when you have to take the asphalt out all the way down to the base, right? So you're getting all the way down, then when the base is shown, you're usually recompacting. At that point, it's basically a brand new parking lot. Very rarely are you not having to even modify curbs and gutters and things like that for drainage. And so reconstruction is broken into three separate sections. If it's less than 25% of the parking lot by area, so we just ask them to provide us the total area they're going to redo. If it's less than 25% they're exempted, they just can fix it. It's great. We're done. We don't really care. If it falls between that 25 and 50%, that's when landscaping is required on the parking lot adjacent to the right of way. If you have three sides of your parking lot adjacent to three street sides, that means three sides. If the parking lot only faces one side of a street, it's just one side. It differs for different properties, obviously, depending upon where the parking lots range. We've even had projects where parking lots have been on two separate streets, and they've redone them both, and they've had to do two sides kind of on opposite sides of the site. So... If it's between 50 and 75%, it's kind of the third tier, which is all sides of the parking lot are required to be landscaped. And then we also, at that time, we'll address any type of spaces to make sure that they're conforming. So parking spaces have to meet right widths and things. And then also any stacking for drive-throughs have to conform.

Councilor O'Doherty. What does stacking for driveways is that?

Yeah. Absolutely. So think if you have a drive-thru, think of your favorite drive-thru restaurant. We have requirements for the ability to have a certain amount of cars stacked in that drive-thru so that it doesn't block like a fire lane, it doesn't block the entrance to an adjacent property owner, it doesn't block the drive-thru so people can get around the building, things like that, or it doesn't stick out into the street.

Councilor Shumway.

Thank you, Mayor. Director Tini, if a person did not want to go through all the steps required by you for changing a parking lot and they just did 24%, waited a month, did another 24%, waited a month, did the other 24%.

I had the same thought.

Is that possible?

No, it's not. The first 24%, we have a site plan process, you turn it in. That's why we record and maintain those applications. And so the next time that they come in and they get over the 24%, then they'll be in the next section, 25 to 50%. So that's how we handle that. It's just tracking of our applications and modifications of parking lots since the adoption of this section of the code.

Follow-up, counselor? Just a quick follow-up. How many years would they have to wait before they are non-compliant?

I mean, until, I guess, the section of code changes. So, yeah. Lastly, if it's over 75% of the parking lot and they want to redo that, then that's when we just ask the parking lot to come into full conformance. So parking lot spaces, stacking, landscaping, anything else, the ADA access, some things like that. For most parking lots, once you come into conformance, it's probably the landscaping and ADA access seems to be the most complicated pieces of the puzzle. So... Now, one thing we did also build into this section of code is we recognize that when reconstruction occurs, especially when you start getting in those higher percentages, you could lose parking spaces. And so we built into a process which we allow for, if there's up to a 20% loss of spaces, you can request minor administrative modification. That's a staff process, which I'm still gonna talk about it in a minute, I promise. But it allows staff to provide reasonable flexibility and adjustments so that they can lose less parking spaces. What we would commonly do with this practice, and we've used this before, is we will typically remove landscaping or adjust drive aisles, so maybe there's some one-way drive aisles so that they can gain spaces somewhere else. That's usually been the easiest way for us to handle it. We probably would be willing to consider something else, even considering maybe not even requiring certain things if we just had to get to that point. But that would be something that we would work with the property owner to try to figure out. Landscaping requirements. I've kind of mentioned to you the two larger triggers, which one would be any type of new development that's going to require landscaping on site. So if you're doing some sort of expansion that triggers that type three site plan, that's where you're going to be required to do more landscaping on your site. Most type one site plans aren't really requiring any landscaping. The only time we see type one site plans typically landing with some landscaping is when they do like an addition or a parking lot modification, or let's say they have a drainage issue and they have to remove like a landscaping buffer. What we do is then have them propose where those, let's say they take two trees out, find another location for the two trees, which often is just in an existing island or landscaped area that exists on site. Sometimes it can be more complicated, but that typically is what happens. The type two site plan, remember, kind of triggers that perimeter landscaping, so only things on the outside, typically adjacent to the streets. So depending upon the property, it could be more or less, you know, if you have more street frontages. The whole idea there, it's the middle of the road, but we want to see it adjacent to where we're seeing things where it's more visible, which is usually the street side. A few other kind of considerations in this whole broader process. Interior changes being excluded. So this allows someone to really keep their building up to shape in terms of what they need for their business activity within the building without being required to do things like landscaping or change the facade of the building or things like that. Another point that I'd like to make is the difference, remember we have municipal code and the building code. These are pretty much the two processes that affect when someone wants to redevelop their site. Municipal code are kind of the things we're mostly talking about here. Building codes, the physical construction, right? Where the wires go, how many outlets you have to have, what your HVAC system needs to do. And then the three methods of flexibility. So we're here. There's three processes. One's the alternative equivalent compliance, and I always stress the word alternative. It's the developer proposing an alternative method to satisfy code. An example of that, I would say one that we use probably on every other project almost that comes to the city is allowing for modifications where and how landscaping is installed. Could be anything from one tree not being put in a certain location and three bushes being put in that location so that there's better visibility for the door, a front door. It could be for on one side of a site, modifying some of the landscaping and moving it to the front of the site because up at the front, the buffer is bigger for whatever reason. We often use it for parking to provide alternative parking for kind of more unique uses where maybe there's some fleet vehicles or things like that and they can stack them differently. So pretty common process, that's an administrative process. The key for us is it's alternative and it's equivalent. That there's not a loss there. Still achieves the intent to code, but it's a general equivalent. Now we don't always agree. And so sometimes that's doesn't always work. But for the most part, I would say we usually can get to some level of of agreeance on most most requests that are made.

Councilor Newman, I just want to make sure I understood that right. So for an example, site plan says, I don't know, landscaping needs to be here, but they want to put it here. That's something you guys would work out.

I think what we would be looking at is one, what's the reason for it? Let's say a tree is supposed to go on a certain side of the site and we realize that maybe in the future it might run into the building or something. I don't know. moving it to another side of the site isn't probably consequential. Now, if they wanna move all the landscaping on that side of the site to one side, we would wanna probably have a real good reason for that. There's been a couple projects where we've had some really unique spots on the property where, I mean, I'm telling you, I don't think anybody ever is gonna see it. And they've said, hey, we would love to move it up street side. We don't have to run our irrigation to the back of the property, but we could dress it up on the side. That's logical for us, and they're not asking for less landscaping. They're just moving it to a different location. So we do that pretty routinely. The other one is minor administrative modification. If you remember two code changes ago that we proposed, we increased this from 20% to 25%. What this is is a numerical change And so what I think is important about this is, so think, let's go, let's use our landscaping example. Minor administrative modification allows for staff to reduce by 25% maybe the number of landscaping units on a site. Where we would use this versus like alternative equivalent compliance might be in a spot where let's say the site has A building that was built on the property line on two sides. So two of their sides have adjacent people's buildings right up to the property line. And really, the landscaping, if we put it all in, it's just not going to live. It's going to run into each other. It's going to be too dense. It's just not going to function well. We can reduce that through this process in an effort to reasonably try to allow them to move through their site not have to do any type of a variance or go to a board of adjustment meeting, but also reasonably recognize the site conditions that we have. We've done this for parking. We've done this for building facades. So we've allowed for buildings with the right design components to maybe have a little bit more of a material that's maybe not allowed. We can do this kind of for anything that's a numerical item within our code. We do this for setbacks periodically, building height. So all those things give us a little bit of room to allow for adjustments. Now, the minor administrative modification, still staff administered. However, there's a notice process with that. So we do notice adjacent property owners this, because it's a little bit more of a change, right? It's not an equivalent. And then finally, variance processes, right? Anybody can ask for a variance, that's not a new thing. But remember that that standard's fairly high. Your intent for a variance is not to grant variances just for anything that anybody asks for, but that there is an actual unique scenario that needs an exception to code that we can't kind of fall into these two other areas, so.

Councilor Shumway.

Thank you, Mayor. Director Cheney, I'm thinking about the additional land that Walmart has. If they were to start adding businesses on that additional land, let's say a restaurant, a real estate office, a car wash, something like that, at what point do they have to comply in their parking and landscaping?

mayor and council. So like for that property, for instance, under the current code, pretty much anytime any new building goes up, that area is going to have to come into compliance. So let's just think about that property. Um, You know, logically, you could probably fit a couple restaurants or a strip center or something like that on the edge of the Walmart space that's kind of on the outside there. That site would have to fully come into conformance in terms of that lot wherever it is. Now, my guess is Walmart would probably subdivide the property first. They wouldn't leave it as part of the Walmart parcel. So if they did leave it as part of the Walmart parcel, we could require the whole Walmart site to come into conformance with a large brand new building if it met one of the thresholds of like 20% or 20,000 square feet. My guess is they're not going to do that. They would probably divide the property off. But then just think, it would be like a brand new restaurant going in today. It would meet all of our requirements. It would have a parking lot that met the required spaces. It would have landscaping. It would have driveway accesses. It would have sidewalks adjacent to it out to the public way. It would be a modern site per our code. So I've kind of run you through just like, what do we do today? But I think you all recognize and you've kind of, as we go through these processes, we bring you code amendments, we talk about these different things. So what are some of the things that we're hearing about? What are the kind of common issues and considerations we need to think about when we talk about our code? So public infrastructure costs, right? When I talked about the type three site plan, that's full conformance with code. So a development that's going in that's a lot of times it's a greenfield site, but also it could be a large remodel or something like that. If it's on a site that doesn't have infrastructure that's built to our current standards, they have to upgrade it, right? You've all heard it. We've all talked about it, right? We recognize that that is a huge cost. It's the largest cost when it comes to development, right? We recognize that it can be a barrier to development. And I think that, right, the fundamental question is who's gonna pay for it, right? the city pay for every time somebody does a development project and it's adjacent to a dirt road. I think we all know the budget on that doesn't work out. We also can't really predict what's going to happen. We have quite a few roads within Laramie specifically. Let's think about unpaved streets in West Laramie. That's a whole another issue even to think about and contemplate when it comes to redevelopment. Being very honest with council, like areas like in West Laramie, think like North 1st and 2nd Street, South 1st and 2nd Street, those properties are difficult to redevelopment simply because of infrastructure costs. So I think that's something that as a community, we're starting to have those conversations, but I think we've got to figure out, do we still just go down the same path we're going down? or is there something else we want to do? We do have, we've talked, the council has talked about different budgetary items related to improving streets over time, but we're not going to get them all done all at once. And so I think that that's really the reality is how do we address that? Now some of that stuff too, we need to make sure that sidewalks and things like that are in. We have to have those in for ADA access. hard to put a sidewalk in when the street's not there. And we're not probably putting a street in there if the water or sewer or stormwater infrastructure isn't available for the long-term development of that area. It's a big issue, but I think it's worthwhile to point out that that does affect development. We're not oblivious to that, and we see it sometimes be a very difficult point for people to consider. With those properties, I think, too, the broader consideration is, are those properties really worth what maybe those people are buying those things for when they know that that's what those improvements are supposed to be? That's a hard conversation to have. No one wants to have that conversation, but I think that that is the reality of some of those properties within our community. Pre-existing parking lots, even with the different tiers that we have, literally it's one of the things that I talk a lot about with people that own properties that have parking lots in my office. Generally speaking, most people just want to repave their whole parking lot and not have to do anything forever. That's what the request is a lot of times, which is fine. But remember, repair and maintenance are exempted. But what I'm going to say is that many parking lots are not being maintained and thus no longer can be repaired. When a parking lot gets to a certain condition, you can't mill it and put a new lift of asphalt on it. It just doesn't work. The contractor will tell you we can do it, but it's just going to fall apart. That's when you have to get in there, recompact your base, do all the extra work to really make it last. parking lots that are lasting they're doing regular maintenance they're they're milling and overing overlaying it periodically and you probably know what those parking lots are when you pull into them in our community and so you know full full replacement means compliance or do we look at some other type of levels or do we change the percentages or do we change what's required i think that that's all something to kind of consider Parking lot islands are also kind of brought up in this broader conversation. Parking lot islands being something are only required when the parking lot fully has to be reconstructed, right? So those other tiers don't require islands being installed. So I think that that's something I wanna point out. So really it's only when you're required to fully reconstruct them.

What's the functional purpose of a island?

Yeah, so a couple things. One, remember the philosophical shift, right? One was to simply beautify the site, to kind of break up the sea of asphalt. Two, it's in our code, it's to define driveways and drive aisles and larger parking lots. There's a threshold of when we require islands in our code. The islands provide a barrier from where traffic is going back and forth versus pulling into a parking spot. And then third, there's the environmental kind of component, which is kind of reducing the heat islands that we have when a parking lot doesn't have any type of shade landscaping or anything like that. So those are kind of the three main pieces that are in our code. The other one is on very large parking lots. to provide breaks for pedestrians so that they can walk through the parking lot in a protected space is what is required.

Does a parking lot island require greenery?

Yes. Okay. Yep.

Thank you.

And I'll point out in pre-2010 it did and post-2010 it did. So whether it was being put in pre-2010, I can't say that it probably always was for whatever reason. Let's talk a little bit about just this kind of idea of flexibility and regulations. Every community has to kind of find the sweet spot in your regulation. The reality of regulations are is it's wherever this community or any other community we're talking about is kind of like you're drawing a line in the sand. what is the minimum requirements that you're going to have to do when it comes to building a new building, modifying a site, which is kind of what we're talking about today. If you haven't looked on our website, we track every single change we've ever made to the development code. infinite scroll list below the code of all the different changes we've made. I think what's really good is this community is open to that. The council has been open to that traditionally. There's a lot of communities that once the code gets adopted, it's kind of like we're not gonna touch it conversation. I personally don't agree with that and haven't recommended that to the council in any of the time that I've had the ability to come up here and say that that's what you all should do. I think we have to be able to be flexible, modify our codes when we see issues and try to address things. I think too, We'll tell you we're not going to get it right every single time. There's going to be times that even like in 2010, we adopted that code and I mean, we spent two years working on it and we thought, man, this is going to be pretty good stuff, right? Like this is going to work really well. And we're like immediately like the first project that comes in jokingly, but like really the first project comes in, we're like, this is going to be kind of hard, right? So I think giving staff, whether it's me up here or anybody else in other departments, the ability to bring recommendations to try to address issues I think is really important. Two, I think you know we're tracking these issues. It allows me to put something like this together. It allows us to have conversations. We literally have a list in our office of all the different things that kind of come up, and we try to evaluate them. We try to say, like, is there a better way to do this? Is it just that the language is unclear? Is it a major roadblock? Just because it's a major roadblock, though, we don't necessarily always say we should change it, right? But those are some things that we try to track and try to understand how is it affecting development in our community. And then two, flexibility, right? It has to be built into code. It can't be just staff picking and choosing what we want to do. That puts you in a bad spot for the conversation, I don't remember, was it member Bowling, was that you when you said, why did you let him do this over here but not over here? I mean, I don't know, somebody said, All right. Well, there you go. Mr. Freed. Mr. Freed. Member Freed. Anyway, and I think that is what we're trying to do. We want... to treat everyone the same, right? If somebody builds a similar site, it should be pretty similar. And that's kind of our hope when we have our codes and why we establish it. Of note, developer survey is now closed. We got a lot of really good comments. We're kind of going through those and we'll be setting up kind of that developer meeting here shortly. A lot of the comments, I'm just gonna say, have this little, this little precursor. If you're interested, uh, there's a lot of the same kind of same topics. There's a lot of things also to kind of related to like bigger picture development thing, like subdivisions and things like that. So, um, a lot of really good comments, but like I said, we're kind of wading through that. And I think to, you know, doing these types of things is not all communities are doing this. A lot of communities just kind of, uh, just hopefully the, the noise doesn't get too loud. And I, I just don't think that that's a good approach. Other things, the building codes I'm going to mention. Probably one of the big things that we see as a community is when new businesses open, them being unaware of the requirements of building code. Unlike our municipal code, when someone does change the use in their building, it can trigger building code requirements, not only building code, but fire code requirements.

Okay.

We do have lots of situations where a change in use could mean firewalls being required, egress or ingress into the building being modified. So we're talking new doors, new stairwells could be pretty extensive. It could be a full fire suppression system being installed in a building. These are all costly things, right? A lot of times if they're not aware of it, they could make a project completely infeasible because they had no idea why they weren't even budgeting for it. What I'll say though is we don't have any business licensing process. We have no way to alert somebody prior to them purchasing a building or even contemplating starting a new use to even let them know that these things may exist. We run into this periodically. This happens once a month, once a week, sometimes it just depends. What happens is this is often us telling them after the fact. They've already purchased the building and they want to open a business or they want to do something. That is a really hard conversation to have with somebody. But there's no wiggle room in whether they're going to put a fire suppression system in or something like that. I'll also point out though, the International Code Council, we have a whole section. It's all about how to modify existing buildings and existing building code. We use it routinely and so it is a great, for people that have an existing building. Let's say it was built in 1960. They've got to upgrade the wire or they were building an addition. It contemplates the circumstances so that there's safety involved in what's being changed and modified, but also reasonability and allowing things to still happen.

Director Tini. I'm just wondering, in the manner in which planning has reached out to developers and contractors to help educate and to help understand what their needs are, et cetera, have we tried doing that with realtors, especially those who specialize in commercial property?

Yeah. It was probably, man, it's probably been, it's maybe, it feels like it was sooner than this, but I'd say it's probably within the last year. Actually, Phillip went and spoke to the Realtors organization during one of their regular meetings and kind of talked through just kind of some of the big things that are happening, code changes, just kind of general things. I'll actually, I'll talk a little bit about it. Just is, you know, education I think is an important component of like this whole conversation. One of the things that we struggle with just in government, right, is engaging the public. We've done events where we've had, you know, kind of developer 101 things or boot camps and things. not had anybody show up. Now, does that mean that we should stop? Absolutely not. That's not how this works. But I think education is a component, trying to provide information, have information available so that whether it's a realtor, whether it's a contractor, whether it's a homeowner, whether it's just the general citizen can make good decisions and educated decisions. I'll say though, sometimes too, it's not always just like a straightforward answer. Sometimes it takes time and effort. And sometimes we see that a lot of times that isn't always what somebody wants to do. So, yeah.

Vice Mayor, you have a question?

Thank you, Mayor. I have a similar kind of thought regarding realtors on this process, and I'm also wondering if we have done any engagement with the lenders and the mortgage companies, or I should say the broad ones, but the lenders who work locally to make sure they are informed to inform the folks they are giving loans to as to what some of these requirements are to make sure that the the people who may be buying the business and not understanding what sorts of upgrades need to happen can be better informed on that.

Mayor, Councilor, I would say a lot of our engagement with the lenders and generally the banking or financing industry are a lot of times not directly related to development. We've never done a specific... financial institution developer conversation. Um, I, I don't, I, once again, it would just be another arm of education. So I'm definitely not opposed to it. Um, it seems like most of our interactions with like the financial or baking industry are kind of on the periphery of things. Like when we're talking about like housing, for instance, which has been a big topic, right. In this community, a lot of the conversation has been centered around, you know, When are loans given versus when aren't loans given? Not necessarily like the stipulations or the things that they're looking at as to why or why not they're giving a certain amount of money out, I guess. So I would say it's... definitely something to consider for sure. And it could provide another avenue of education for someone that's part of that like broader development process, right? The financial piece is a piece of that bigger puzzle of somebody doing some sort of redevelopment project in the community.

And I think what we're getting at is people who in good faith purchase a building and don't realize that they need to find out what a change of use is going to initiate. And so I'm just wondering how common that is and if it does warrant community outreach to try and get those who might be engaged in that sale of commercial property to direct them, go talk to the city before we give you this loan. So I think that's what the vice mayor and I are trying to get at. How big is this issue and is there something that we could proactively do to where they would be directed, go talk to planning before you sign on the dotted line.

I mean, I'll say we can provide the information, we could do the education, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna send them to us. We have a really good partnership with the Laramie Chamber Business Alliance. And it's really interesting when we communicate with each other, we're really good about sending each other people that show up to my office to them and them to us in an effort to try to like bridge those gaps. but also there's many people that do not do any of those things, right? I would say at least half the projects that come across our door, they've never talked to us. That's totally fine, but we are truly an open door with lots of resources that can make that process easier. We encourage it. We don't charge for pre-application meetings. We'll have 100 of them if that's what it takes to get a project. ready for submittal. And sometimes people don't take that. The Laramie Chamber Business Alliance has resources available for developers to analyze things like drainage and, you know, different cost structures and things. And sometimes those things aren't taken advantage of. And that's a tough, right? That's tough. And I think Once again, though, what I would say is I think we should continue to do those things. We've done social media posts. We have information available on the website. We've done some of these meetings. And I think that's something we plan to continue probably regardless of where this conversation goes because we still do find it effective. We find there are people that we reach, right? And so even if we're reaching just a few people and those few people have a successful experience in terms of the process, That's a good thing, I think, for us as a community. Let's see. Other things. Let's see, we were done with that slide. There we go. Changes in the site plan process. Generally what I would say is I think the type one and type three site plan process work well in our community. They seem to fit the project size and what they're doing well. In the type three site plan, I mean, I'm just going to say every project something somebody might not want to do something that's a pretty common conversation. I don't think it's unique to our community, you know, whether it's they think it's too much landscaping or too much parking or the design standards too rigid or whatever. Right. But overall, those processes, I think, work well. We can apply the code. But one thing we're recognizing is really the type two site plan we don't think is working very well. Recently we've just had some conversations with the Laramie Chamber Business Alliance and I think at some point we're gonna have something before this council that essentially consider expanding the projects that fall into the type two versus the type one or the type three, okay? Once again, remember, it's kind of the middle of the road, right? It's a little bit of improvements, but not the full requirement, not everything. And I think if we can find a way to have more projects land there, it will allow for a little bit more of incremental change on a site versus an all or nothing kind of a situation. Another thing that I'm going to bring up is kind of long-term site maintenance and improvements. What we see a lot of times, really no matter when the site was developed, could have been built five years ago, complexities in changing the site become more difficult when the property isn't maintained. and right this is kind of one of those conversations it's like do you really want to point out like the people that aren't doing what they probably should be doing but I'm gonna because I think it's important to our community I think that what we find is whether a It's a parking lot, so I kind of gave you guys that example. You aren't maintaining your parking lot and now you have to fully reconstruct it and now you have to fully meet code, right? We're seeing that across a lot of areas. Our building department sees that when someone wants to redo the inside of the building but it literally hasn't been touched in 50 years. It does make the redevelopment of the interior of that building more complicated. The landscaping that was put in 10 years ago, let's say within the code that's today and they haven't maintained it, it could create complexities when they want to do a small addition because the site isn't in compliance. It's actually out of conformance. It's violating code. We see a lot of buildings modified without permits as well. And we don't catch it until we're actually asked to come in and do a big remodel because they know maybe it can't get done secretly. And that causes a lot of complications. And so I think one thing as a community, I think it's fine to be proud about the fact that good property maintenance is a good investment for our community long term. and that rubs people wrong a little bit sometimes, but I think that as a community, people are not going to invest in your community if it doesn't look good and it isn't being maintained. We, in our office, field a lot of calls, It's been a little while, but the retail coach who is a consultant for this council even today, one of the first times they came into this community, they said, you guys got some rough spots. This is what they told you as a council that will drive away investment within this community, right? That's not what we want to hear, right? We were proud of our community. We have, we know business owners, we know all those people, right? But the reality is, is somebody that's going to come to our, to our community and see a property that's not being maintained or the buildings falling down or the landscaping is dead. That gives them question, right? They have to make that decision. Do they invest here or maybe do they invest in a different town? Sometimes it's maybe they just invest in a different location, right? So in a portion of our community that's maybe not looking as good, maybe they move to a different spot. But that's, I think, something to consider. The sites too that are further out of compliance, like I said, it makes it more difficult to get back to square one. Even just to get to that point sometimes might be more than they ever anticipated and then maybe the building expansion that they want to do or the remodel that they want to do can't be done because they can't afford it now. Definitely something that we see and deal with in our community. Development standards I think are another piece of this puzzle. Our engineering department does have an engineering standard manual, so things as far as what you do with sidewalks and curbs and gutters and drainage and things like that are all addressed. The public works department is currently working on a drainage manual. Drainage is often a pretty complicated conversation when it comes to each site, depending upon how much parking and impervious surface you have. And once again, right? Infrastructure are the highest costs that you have. And so, you know, how do we think about reducing these costs and how do we, but well, while maintaining quality, right? Are there areas that we can reduce our infrastructure costs while maintaining the quality so that we're not repairing it or replacing it in a short amount of time so that it can help current redevelopment sites move forward?

Vice Mayor, did you have a question?

I do. It's going back though, so I can wait till the end if that makes more sense. It's about the type one, two, and three, Derek. So I can just hold it to the end.

I have two more little points here and then I'm wrapping up. So that'd be if that works. Okay. Uses and use levels. One of the things that we're thinking about is do we continue to expand uses within our different zoning districts? As I mentioned earlier, I think that we're always kind of keeping an eye on that. Also too, sometimes there's things we're just not able to keep track of. If you hear things, I think it's always important, reach out to us, see if those are common uses within those zoning districts. We can kind of play the back and forth of like good idea, bad idea. Also vacant properties. Vacant properties are kind of a unique animal currently under code. Let's say you have a restaurant, but let's say that restaurant has not operated in 20 years. That restaurant technically under our code can become a restaurant again with pretty much no changes. I'm not sure that's great for our community. I think that there needs to be a point in which a vacant building that's not contributing good taxes to our community, not providing a service in our community, and really is just a vacant building. building that's showing that there's nothing going on should probably time out in terms of when it should not have to come into full compliance. And so I think that that is something that we've been talking a lot about and trying to figure out where that sweet spot is because it is difficult. As a restaurant that's been closed for five years, is it time to come into conformance?

I don't know, maybe, maybe not.

What about 10 years? And I think that that's kind of the conversation we're having, but also we recognize that there does come a point that we want that vacant building to be something. And I think if they know that they're going to time out and they might have to bring that site into full conformance, they might be more motivated to get something in there. So I think it's something that we're contemplating.

Councillor Shumway.

Thank you, Mayor. I have a perfect example for what we should make a timeout. Third and Grand, the old cowboy bar. Is there any way the council can move on something like that so that we can force the owners of that property to either improve it or sell it or is that something the council could do or is that just a thought that you brought up?

I mean, I think there's probably some different levels of some things that we probably could do. It would be something that we probably don't do in this community very often. We could also write codes to make things happen. But remember, if we do that for this one, there's other properties that are in a similar boat. And I think that, you know, I'm gonna maybe jump a little bit ahead of leaving council with something to think about is, right, all the things that we have in code affect properties. We recognize that. In my office, we know that whether it's a landscaping provision, design requirement, parking lot requirement, whatever, that affects a business owner, it affects a community member, it affects somebody that is thinking about employing maybe a couple new people because they're expanding and they're adding a few more dentist chairs or whatever their business is. I think speaking to this point, there's ways to make things stricter, more difficult in terms of if you were to do something that maybe the community doesn't really like visually or use-wise, but also recognize that it will affect more than one person. And it might be your friend. It might be the business owner that you have coffee with. And I think that that's always something to contemplate is think about it beyond just the one singular thing that we're talking about maybe in this instance about how something like that might affect other things in our community. I'm not saying it might not be a bad approach. Now, I think that there are some other things specifically related to this question. The site that I know the city manager's office is working on. And, you know, I think long term, you know, I think we would like to see something different. But, I mean, that site is a result of we didn't have requirements for patio and porch spaces within our code. We didn't think we needed to regulate it. We kind of said to ourselves, someone's really gonna put a patio or porch in, someone's gonna probably do a pretty nice job, right? Well, we were wrong. Do we have those requirements in code now today? We do, we do. We decided to put in place because one bad instance was more than enough for us. And so, Lastly, I'm just going to talk a little bit about non-conforming uses. This section is kind of a hard section. I don't know if non-conforming uses, the ones that we run into a lot of times are uses that have been there for a long time. There are provisions that they can do, like safety improvements and things like that, but it is difficult to continue to expand them. And so I think we may start to look at these and try to find other communities that might be finding flexibility. We have, though, in Laramie, we did make some changes on specifically non-conforming structures, so structures that maybe you're violating setbacks, maybe you're violating design standards, maybe they're too tall, or maybe they have a use in it that's not compliant. We provided some additional language in this last round of code updates to give us some flexibility so that if somebody is modifying the building towards conformance It gives us the ability to work with them and allow for that use to go there. Essentially what that does is provide for incremental changes in the use or the building to not get them to a spot where it's like, well, I can't do anything with anything because my business has changed a little bit. This gives us a little bit of flexibility in that. But still long term, it's to still get that use to eventually not be there. With that, that's kind of what I kind of wanted to run through. I know it was really broad in some areas, but hopefully good understanding of kind of what the steps we take currently, but also kind of just bringing up what are we hearing, what are we seeing, and like I said, this kind of last few slides, these are some of the things that we've heard through the developer comments that we've got, and I think... you'll hear about them again probably in a little bit different form of some considerations of maybe some different areas or different ways we take this, so.

Councilor Boling.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Derek. Just going back one slide, and I'm curious if this was the Vice Mayor's question as well. In changes to the type two site plan process, some site current type three projects that could become type two and the inverse. Could you just give us examples, hypothetically, if you need to, of what that would look like? It seems to me like on the one hand, type one going to two, it involves quite a bit more requirement for a developer and it's the opposite on the other direction, so I'm just curious.

So I think what I would generally say to it is so maybe it's some changes in the change of use section so that maybe if it's only maybe if it's two levels that falls in a type two versus going all the way to a type three. So that'd be one example. Possibly maybe something related to parking lots. Maybe we build a section within that parking lot section that lands things more into a type two realm versus maybe the current tiers we have. In the building expansion section, an impervious section, Maybe there's some areas there where maybe impervious right now is 2,000. Maybe we increase it to 3,000. Or maybe for impervious surface at 2,000, it only triggers design for drainage, but wouldn't trigger maybe something for the building. I think those are the things that we're trying to work through right now to try to find... that level of like when somebody does something that puts them in a triggering location, whether it's size or things like that, does the type two fit kind of what they're doing a little bit more versus like the type three or the type one? The type 1, I feel like, I don't know how much will the inverse of how many type 1s will now all of a sudden be a type 2. It seems like, if I was to generalize, the boundary between the type 1 and type 2 seems to be pretty good on that end. It's more between the type two and type three. But at this point, that's kind of what we're working through as staff is trying to figure out, I keep saying where the sweet spot is, right? I feel like that's always what I'm doing is where does it kind of land right where it's reasonable, but still gets us further towards seeing an improved site, seeing something that's looking a little bit better. Thank you.

Thank you. Vice Mayor, you have a question or a comment?

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director Tinney. So, excuse me, my questions would be, I have two of them. How do people find out, kind of like look for these type one, two and three? How do they become aware of this before going into a project? And is that something that you come across often that they come to you after they've done something and they weren't aware and now they're kind of in this tricky situation? And then the second part of that is if a developer or, you know, if one of these projects is going on and staff says, you know, uses their discretion and uses their discretion to say like, nope, you can't do this. Is there a route for them to appeal what was said? I've heard a couple comments from developers that sometimes it depends on who you have kind of reviewing what you've done. So that consistency can be tricky for them sometimes. And so just curious on both of those pieces.

Yeah, so to answer the first question, I would say that... how does somebody know that they have to go through a site plan process? I'll tell you, I'll be really honest. We have people that come to our community that don't think that there's codes at all. Like literally they could build whatever building they want and they don't have, there's no standards at all, right? To me, that's just like, they haven't looked to see that there's regulations in place or that there's a building code requirement or anything like that. For those people, that's really difficult. That's a hard one to try to get them to know that something is required. I mean, we do have information. If somebody jumped on our website and looked at the different departments, they'd see that there's a building department. They would logically be able to probably conclude that they have to have a building permit for something, maybe. I mean, maybe not everything, but something. Now the type 2, 1, 2, and 3 site plan for any development, just at the very beginning of our development code and the development standards, it lays out when they're required, why you're required to do it. We also have up on our website, If you're doing development, what are things you need to think about? Frequently asked questions. I would say a majority of the people either A, on a project, they're engaging a professional in our community, either a contractor, an engineer, or some other professional like an architect to help them do their project who are informing them that there are processes required. you know, the few, like a homeowner, because those things are exempt, remember single family and some of that stuff, like, you know, right, they're not doing type one, type two site plan. We do have people that maybe own a building that maybe, you know, they own one commercial building and they may not know. and they may do something or try to do something. That does happen periodically. That's just, I mean, they haven't looked at code. They haven't done it. They didn't check really, right? You know, communities, we try to get information out there about the different processes, like I said. So that's definitely something that, you know, it's trying to educate the public, right? But sometimes that doesn't always work. But for the most part, most people in this community know that they will need to go through some sort of a process either with our building department or with our office or with both in order to do some sort of a project.

Thank you. Are there other questions?

I didn't answer her second question.

And I have a little bit of a follow-up to that. Sorry, Derek. I guess what I'm saying though, one, two, and three, when they're coming to you for some sort of development or the person that they're working with, Are you guys right off the bat categorizing that into a one, two, three so that they know and are prepared for what's coming? Do you know what I mean?

Oh, absolutely. If somebody comes into our office, unless it's some really oddball project or something, we almost immediately can tell them that they're going to fall into the one, two, or three category if they have any type of a meeting with us. We get a lot of emails. We get a lot of those. Someone will email us, say, hey, we're going to do in this type of a project. Here's what we're going to be doing. Could you outline what's going to be required in terms of process or big requirements? I mean, I bet we do one of those emails every other day for somebody. So, yeah. And then going to the second part of the question, We have in the planning office who are the ones that review site plans. There's myself and then three planners. There's also every single department within the city almost looks at these projects in some aspect or another. Different people, when you're going through these codes, when there is the ability for some discretion, could look at things differently. A lot of things like engineering standards, design standards, how we calculate parking. I mean, there's not really any... There's not interpretation there. It's like the building's 3,000 square feet and one space per 300 square feet. That's 10 spaces any way it shakes out. Now, if somebody does not agree with... our review of the code. So it could be interpretation, but that's not really a lot of times, but more what we're requiring. One, you can ask for a variance, right? You can just say, I don't want to do that. I don't want to put parking spaces in or whatever, but let's say that they don't agree that we're reading the code correctly. we're interpreting something differently or that they feel like a different section of code should apply. We have the Board of Appeals that is the same as the Planning Commission. So the Planning Commission, Board of Adjustment, and Board of Appeals, they can consider any staff decision So like the engineering department, city planning, building department is not included in that though. They have their own building and fire code board of appeals, but there's appellate boards for them to consider. And so in that case though, remember it's simply the item that's being considered for an appeal. So you can't just ask for a waiver of things, but you can explain your case and let the board decide whether we're, interpreting or reading code correctly.

Councilor Freed.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Director Tini. Maybe a kind of comment question, but is there a process, let's say someone buys a building, and they might not know the history as well as they should or could, and they want to you know, change it and update it and they get in there, they meet with, you know, your, your department and it's like, Oh wow, we have to do a ton more than we originally thought. We purchased it to bring it up to where we want. Is there like a grace period or do we have a process to be like, we realized that maybe you didn't understand some of this, you know, or tough. You should have looked at this for you, invested whatever you did, but do we have a process for a grace period or a timeline to extend that for circumstances like someone purchasing something and then upon further inspection or for the use that they want, it's greater than they originally thought?

So this happens. I find it really kind of crazy sometimes. The hardest one is when someone buys a house, like an individual buys a house and they realize that they got themselves into a lot. That's a hard conversation. Businesses, same thing. We have those conversations where, I mean, we have people buy properties in this community with never even looked at anything. They simply like wrote the check and bought the property, right? Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, I mean, I wouldn't even bring that up. Um, now if it, To get to your question, the code, no, it doesn't necessarily provide a prescriptive grace period. Whether you purchase a property with the knowledge or without the knowledge of what you should have done or shouldn't have known isn't built into code. That being said... As the director, I do my best to try to work with property owners and people that buy buildings that maybe knowingly or unknowingly did or didn't know what they were supposed to be required to do sometimes. I would say most of the time we can find a solution. We may provide some time to get a site plan application in. We have people that literally will start a business and we send a letter to them being like, you can't actually do this. Some things are more difficult to address than others. If you have a use that's in a zoning district that's not permitted to be there, I have very little flexibility with that. Now, if I have a property that simply needs to make some modifications to the site for let's say like parking or something like that, we may be able to build some grace period in there. It's completely at my discretion. Um, I direct my staff to try to figure out ways to work with them. Uh, we use the bonding process to kind of secure that. Um, it's, it takes a lot of time. Um, it doesn't always work well. Um, often, right, everything is probably a big deal at that point, right? Because a lot of times people are coming into like a situation like that where they thought that they were going to have to do nothing. And we might be requiring actually a lot depending upon the site. Um, The harder ones too on the building side of things, if there's some life safety issue, there's not an option for us. The other tough thing about that is, do you provide time to do things? Time for improvements, time for sites to get upgraded. For non-life safety things, it's more about time management and the ability of staff to keep track of everything. Then the reality is, what do we do if they don't? As much as we're doing our job, which is enforcing code. The last thing I really want to do is if somebody didn't put in their parking lot or didn't put in landscaping, shut their business down. But that's kind of the reality of that conversation. If you start to provide time frames and long periods of time to do improvements, I mean, what happens if the business doesn't go well? Or what if we have an economic recession and nobody's doing well? Is that really what we want to, as a community, start doing? And I think that's kind of why most communities are like, before you do something, you meet our code requirements. And then after that, we're out of your business, right? But it's something we try to do our best to work with people. We run into it routinely. And I think, you know, Most of the time, we find solutions. Sometimes we don't, though. Just being really honest with you as counsel, there are times. Thank you.

Counselor Lockhart has a question, I think. We can't really see him. I don't know if we can minimize this so I can see, but he did have his hand up. Yes, Councilor Lockhart, do you have a question?

You bet. Thank you. I'm actually in the hospital here. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Derek. I just want to use personal experience with Derek and his team on opening a business. When we first did the first bean, when I started talking about different sites and things like that, I... Derek and I kind of figured out after a few months, maybe I should approach him first before I assigned anything on the bottom line. So I knew what codes and what restrictions and what upgrades and things like that I would need to do first. So I knew what I was getting into and that worked very smoothly from that point on. And so this last time for years, I'd reach out to Derek and I'd say, hey, what about this site? What am I up against? What are some of the requirements you're going to require? So I encourage anybody listening to this or watching the meeting or what have you, reach out to the planning department so you have an idea first before you start spending all that kind of money because it saved us a lot of money, saved us a lot of headaches. Some were still headaches, but at least I knew I was getting into it before I signed on the bottom line. And I had nothing but help and success from reaching out. And I think being proactive versus reactive was very beneficial to me anyhow. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor. Any further questions? Oh, did you have something?

I think for anybody looking at doing something in our community, not even just my office, not just my department, but across the city, there's plenty of opportunity for a meeting, information. I mean, we're kind of the cool size of a town. We're just big enough that we've got a lot of resources, we have the ability to do things, but also we're small enough that you can actually call somebody up in our offices and get a meeting set up and talk through these things, and I think that that's a really important component of our community that not all communities can say they can do. Like I mentioned earlier, we allow for pre-application meetings. They're a hundred percent free. I'll do 10 of them. I'll do a hundred of them. If it gets you to that point of getting your submittal in or figuring out what you want to do. Um, it's kind of the fun part of our job too. Like it's, it's fun to meet with people to go through these projects and, and like, like, uh, the council member was saying you know right like we helped hey this site might have this issue and it's got an unpaved road so you have to build it versus oh that site everything looks good but there's no water there or what you know like those are the things we're here for we have the resources that we can provide to the community so thank you further any further questions or comments So one last thing then, if no one else has a comment. So just remember in this community, we have the resources, we're available, but I have this little handout here. So if you want to open a restaurant in Philadelphia, Philadelphia produces this nice graphic here for you to kind of track how you want to do it. This is how you open a restaurant in Philadelphia. So just remember, we are accessible. It's not this many steps, but. I just thought it was kind of funny, but you know, we're here to try to help. We do recognize that these things affect people, but I think too, there's a lot of opportunity in this community. And so thanks.

Thank you. Is there any public comment on this agenda item? Yes, Mr. Glass. Good evening.

Good evening, honorable mayor, members of council, Brett Glass. I have just been amazed by the presentation here. In an hour and 45 minutes, your planning director has barely scratched the surface of the UDC. Hasn't gone into any of the hundreds of pages of detail. At least that handout regarding Philadelphia and opening a restaurant was only a few pages. There are hundreds of pages of expensive requirements in the UDC and every simplification the council seems to have before it to change things actually isn't a simplification but has more details. Some things in the UDC make it extremely difficult to make any changes to anything. This table which you've seen, for example, which talks about the changes of uses, the granularity is incredible. There are 14 levels of this. Make any change to anything and you wind up triggering tremendous requirements which are very expensive and very difficult to fulfill. The UDC is a monster and it drives away investment, it deters maintenance, it really makes me feel that if I ever wanted to develop anything, I would do it in the county rather than the city because it's just too much. I once did honestly, I once proposed adding an addition to my house, adding a bathroom, something very simple and obvious that I had been planning to do for years and then when I bought the property, The city engineer at the time said, no problem. And just ran into a complete morass and abandoned the project because it was just so complicated to do this very simple thing. So anyway, I ask you to, when you're looking at the UDC, when you're looking at proposed changes to the UDC, please simplify, simplify, simplify. Try to remove all these nitpicky requirements that just make it too complicated and too discouraging so that people don't want to develop it all. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Glass. Yes.

Mayor, we have Linda Devine online.

Oh, yes, bring her in. Good evening. You have a comment on this agenda item?

Yes, just briefly and first of all, thank you, Madam Mayor. And I really enjoyed that presentation. Mr. Tahini explained things really well and I appreciated that. I think what I just, it was kind of more of a what if. just listening to the codes and changing them. And one of the things that struck me was about if properties, you know, not maintained or doesn't look well, that it might discourage developers. And this is just kind of a, I wish what if, if we could, if there was money or grants available to help folks that have, property and disrepair that have lived there for years, but just don't have the money to repair their property. So just kind of one of those wishful thinkings, wanted to comment on that. And thank you again, appreciated the presentation.

Thank you, Linda. Any further? Public comment, okay. Back to council. Council, do you have any final comments you wanna make? All right, then we will move on to city council updates and council comments. Any, where should we start? Vice Mayor, you got any updates?

um i do not because i don't have my notebook in front of me so i can't remember my date uh other than i should say tomorrow is uh is uh y o gibbs day so um give to your favorite nonprofit tomorrow i'll plug that um and then upcoming meetings actually i do i think uh nope i think my next one is my dba meeting is coming up so no i think i'm good otherwise

Okay, thank you. Councillor Lockhart, do you have any updates?

Thank you, Mayor. No, as I called in sick yesterday, I wasn't able to attend, and I got hold of Derek too late to actually find someone to replace me. I apologize.

That's okay. Thank you, and we're thinking about you, and speedy recovery to you.

Thank you.

Councillor Bolling.

Thank you, mayor. Um, just one update. We had police advisory board, um, last Tuesday. Um, just a couple things to report. Um, uh, we passed the goals for the, um, upcoming, uh, year of that board service, uh, just slightly amended. Um, um, something to note is that in the past every other month has been a training for the police advisory board which is has typically not been open to the public we're gonna move those to public meetings the same way that work sessions work Most of the information covered in those trainings is applicable to public participation should they want to. And it also will be at the discretion of the leadership of the police department along with the board if there is a topic that needs to be included in training that is not acceptable for public participation. at which point it'll go to executive session. But that should be an interesting thing for people that want to participate and become more involved in that. One thing I did want to note, if anyone is interested, because I did talk to some of the sergeant and some of the officers about this, is that on August 5th, 6th, and 7th, the LPD will be doing sort of a... training, multi-agency training. I'm gonna butcher this, so, sorry, Brian. Which does require some volunteers if anyone on council was interested in playing a role either as a victim or as a volunteer. criminal, I suppose. If that's something you are interested in any of those sessions, they are looking for volunteers to play those roles. I think in one scenario would require you getting hit with projectiles. So getting handcuffed, hit with projectiles. So just be aware of that. But if you want to know more, just get ahold of me and I'll direct you to Sergeant Gross.

Thank you.

Councilor Vigil. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, just one update from me. We had human rights and relations last Wednesday. I think it was probably our most productive meeting thus far. I felt really good about it. We talked about Nancy OP gave an update on our municipal equality index scorecard. just kind of educated the commission on what that is. And then we talked a little bit about the non-discrimination ordinance that we have currently. And some of the commission members might want to explore updating some language at some point. Nothing's solidified yet. but yeah i just want to give a big shout out to brannon and to nancy op they've been huge huge helps on the staff side um just getting us organized and i know it's like herding cats but um yeah it felt it felt really good so that's all i got thanks

Well, thank you, Councillor Vigil, and I just want to thank you for the effort that you've put in to getting this commission up and running. It's a daunting task to get a new commission or board going. I've done it myself, and you've done a good job, and thank you. Councillor Shumway.

Thank you, Mayor. I want to find out what the projectiles will be for the council. Is it going to be stones or fruit?

I think it's paintballs.

Okay.

Or something similar.

All right. So we will survive. Okay. The other thing is I think the final event that I was involved in for the 250 celebration is the food truck there'll be a semi load of food dropped off at interfaith next week we have volunteers to unload it also tough guys has volunteered to be there with their skid steer to help pull up 17 pallets off the truck and i think this is going to be a great you know a blessing to all of the different organizations that receive this food, including Interfaith, Soup Kitchen, Downtown Clinic, and other groups that are benefiting from this. That's all I have.

And thank you, Councillor Shumway, for your effort in pulling all of this together. Yes, city manager.

Mayor, if I could ask that tonight. We were asked by Ted at the soup kitchen if the city had a pallet jack available. We do, and it will be provided on that day to move the pallets of food through the truck to the skid steer.

Also, Interfaith has a pallet that we lifted onto the truck last time. Is it going to be dropped off at the soup kitchen? I believe it's Interfaith. Yeah, okay. Well, Interfaith has one of those pallet jacks too that we lifted up into the truck. They pulled it to a point where then the skid steer could go under it, lift it up, put it down, and take it up the ramp to the... Interface so we they've done it before I'm sure it'll go well again.

Well, we have a pretty good crew That's gonna be there to help unload to yeah, just wanted to let you know that we've been asked to assist in our participating Okay

Very good. Thank you. Councillor O'Doherty. Well, I've been a slacker, so I missed Finance Committee at Laramie Advisory Commission on Disabilities, but they were at the Freedom House of Birthday giving information about living with disabilities. And I want to say, after being in Europe, One of the things my daughter kept saying, well, say what you will about America, but we have, and I think we have better accessibility for people with disabilities, although in a lot of, in Netherlands and Germany and France, they had those little like one person, it's something like a wheelchair, but it's enclosed and it's, or like it's like a, Anyway, this little one person thing. So a person with a disability can use the bike trail and all that kind of stuff to get right up to a place. So that was pretty cool. And the other thing is I'm so proud of our water. And here we are in Switzerland and you think you order water or you ask for water and they give you a plastic bottle of water. Anyway, so I'm proud of our water here in Laramie. That's it. Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Freed.

Thank you, mayor. Parks and Rec board was canceled. Um, and so just cause it's the summer and it's pretty traditional for parks, trees and rec board. They want folks outside, but, um, an update on the bike park. They're doing awesome work. So if you haven't checked it out, I think the city's posted on social media. You can see it, uh, from, you know, the ice and event center, the rec center, but they're doing awesome work, uh, out there for the bike park. And so stay tuned. I'm sure we'll have director Bork talking about that here soon, but, um, that that's really cool. Um, And then there's no Ranch Advisory Commission this month because it meets quarterly. The River Depot Board didn't meet because of Jubilee Days. And then I was unable to make the Traffic Safety Commission meeting. So no other updates for me.

Thank you. Councilor Newman.

I just had Finance Committee and with Director Wade taking Assistant City Manager now, we learned that the other Jen from Finance will now be doing our meetings and the first time she got to run this and it went pretty smooth and we had some questions that I think Council will and we'll be getting some an email on our notes and meeting reports coming soon to get some of those answered.

Okay, thank you. Let's see. I attended Freedom Has a Birthday with the vice mayor and with our city clerk. I gave a little four-minute speech, and we also handed out three awards for the 250 challenge, which thank you, Joe, for that idea. And it's still active. Finance Committee, all that I'll add is that we're aware that there's significant increases occurring across the country with fuel, electricity, and chemicals. And so we're targeting that just to look at what that percent increase is to try to get a handle on the impact that it's having on our city services. And the other comment I would make related to finances, there's a lot of money in software. chose the wrong thing. No, I didn't. Then on the 8th started with, I had civil service commission and we have both with police and with fire qualifiers who have gone through testing and we reviewed those qualifications. I had airport board early that morning and didn't slip right through it. So that was the day after council. That's a hard one to make. And then that evening, comprehensive plan, we had the last meeting of the steering committee. and it is just a very devoted, smart, engaged group of citizens from our community who have volunteered for the last year to attend meetings, to read pages and pages of documents. I was so impressed with their comments, their work, and their understanding of the comprehensive plan, its intention. We worked with the maps, nice big maps of our city and how we are envisioning development in the future. And that plan now we're making, We are finished with comments so that final draft will be completed and then we will shortly receive a report on the new comprehensive plan. But it was just a marvelous experience to work with planning and our consultants and this group of citizens from the community. And then, Friday, the Vice Mayor, Councilor O'Doherty and I will be at the farmer's market. And so come by and see us, come visit. We'll have all kinds of information and a few little nice things. And so we hope to see you there. And that's it. So next, we will go through our review for the agenda. Councilor Newman, did you have something?

Yeah, something on the consent agenda nine I. I would like to add the quarterly open house to the scheduled meetings on July 29th at 6.30 to eight at the Lincoln Community Center.

Okay, and I agree with you. I would like to add that on, and then we'll get more details about that next week. But that will be our quarterly at the Lincoln Center, 6.30 to 8, and I believe it will be preceded by a community meeting. dinner sponsored by Linda Devine. So we'll get more details on that next week. Okay.

City Clerk. Thank you, Mayor. I received an email from City Manager for two additional items. One is a ward of contract for the purchase of furniture for City Hall annex portion of the City Hall campus remodel project. And the other one is a letter of opposition opposing the implantation of bigger commercial trucks.

Okay.

So if with your permission, we'll go ahead and get those added as well. Yes.

Can we have a little bit more detail of the trucks?

Yeah, Honorable Mayor and City Council, there's some federal legislation going through to allow for larger trucks to be on the interstates up to 91 feet. And this is the... approval of a letter opposing the use of the bigger trucks and we've got some backup documentation from the coalition against bigger trucks and then a support letter that they've drafted that they would like us to forward on to our federal delegation for that issue.

And we do have some information that was given to us regarding what that increased weight does to the roads and bridges, with that increased weight, the distance for stopping, and we already have quite a few accidents on I-80. So, yes, Councillor Bolling.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. of course add to the agenda are they going on consent or on the regular agenda?

Which? The honorable mayor the consent will be the coalition against bigger trucks and then the other ones 202,000 will be on the regular agenda. And we include you know.

Will we include in that some of the information that was given to us?

Yeah I can so you'll be able to look. I can get it out to council sooner so you can see it.

Okay thank you. Is there anything else on the agenda that anyone wishes to address? Well, then I say we are adjourned. Thank you.