Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

It is 6.30, so we can start this Planning Commission study session. I don't believe we called roll, and it does appear that we have one, two, three, four, five members present, which is a quorum.

Before this evening, we have two items that are somewhat related. They are independent, but we decided that since we were talking about the two subjects that we might as well have them at the same study session. and run them on a similar path, at least as proposed. So the first one is electric vehicle charging stations. So for the agenda, I'll give a brief introduction, go through the electric vehicle charging code update, some of the finer points of that. about this legislation and then a general discussion. So as an introduction, in 2024, the state passed the Colorado Electric Vehicle Charging Model Land Use Code and Guidance. So they actually, they passed, excuse me, HB 24-1173, which resulted then, that was the legislation So after that, the State Department of Energy, or Energy Office, came up with this model code and guidance. And so they gave us a few options. One of the options, though, that staff is recommending is to work within the ULUC to update the ULUC provisions. There are a few somewhat larger changes, but most of them are pretty minor in nature. So I'm going to go through those in high level. So the EV charging code update requires principal uses for EV charging stations. So our current code right now discusses EV charging as a principal use in conjunction with fuel sales retail. So it's basically lumping gas stations in with principal UCB charging stations. So what we're proposing is to break those out for a couple of reasons.

One, I think it merits its own.

Two, as we'll discuss here in the future with the gas station presentation, the states guidance mandates that principal EV charging stations be allowed in more places than what we're looking to do with the gas stations. So we're proposing, and we've been working with the state for the better part of six months, six to eight months, on draft code language going back and forth, allowed in DTA, DMU, NCCM, MFR, BC, and IP. So basically that's everything with the exception of the four predominantly single family residential districts and then two of the downtown districts. So one is the downtown core, so the historic area. And the second one is the DNR, the Downtown Neighborhood Residential, which is, once again, predominantly more single family or lower density residential in the downtown area. And open space. We exempted it from open space because our open space standards are pretty much that, parkland, et cetera. So in this, as a principal use, you are allowed to have bulk standards. And your current code for a lot of those standards can apply. We can also add some conditions. So setbacks and things of that nature we can work on. Working with the state, they see these items as being similar to gas stations in that they would like us to have very specific allowances for canopies or the ability to have canopies, the ability to have car washes, and the ability to have convenience stores on those sites, very similar to what we do at gas stations. So we've built those items into our draft ordinance, which we intend to roll out on the first meeting in March after this conversation. And then approval process would be site plan. So that would be an administrative process. That's something that the state really wants to see also as an administrative process for the EV charging stations. Then accessory use stations. So this is a charging stations in a lot of locations so you know dta dms dmu and ccm we skip more or less those four residential uh areas because um you know you're allowed to place one in your garage you can run one that attaches to the home already there. So those are not really accessible to the public, but they are allowed in many cases. And then MFR, BCIP, and we do allow it in open space. So if you have a park with a parking lot, you can include some accessory use EV charging. And those are currently allowed through just a building permit process and that's what the state also wants to see us keep. Accessory use standards continued. So there are a few things though that the state has indicated some of those standards that we can allow in principle as principal uses. We can work on buffer yards. We work on screening. As accessory uses, though, we are required to exempt the accessory use from setbacks, from buffer yards, from screening requirements. The state is also working with, we're working with them on a draft that would change or have a non-conforming provision. You would still have to, if you were going into an existing parking lot, you would still have to make sure that your accessible parking spaces are up to code, but you wouldn't have to, say, resurface the whole parking lot or something or change the setback if it's in a If it encroaches into a parking setback now, you would have to make that change. So if you're installing just an accessory EV station. So we're also proposing a slight change to our sustainability incentives. There is one sustainability incentive that developers can apply for that indicates as long as you put in 5% of your parking spaces as EV stations, you get a credit. So back in the summer, the city of Littleton adopted the Colorado model electric ready and solar ready code. It sounds very similar to what we're talking about today, but it's actually kind of the building component, whereas we're talking about the land use parts of Colorado's actions. So that model electric ready and solar ready code requires stations be provided in four different styles and to different amounts. So we felt that this new code was being put in place would nullify that sustainability bonus. It would actually just be a gimme. And so we changed that, or we're proposing to change that, to I believe it's 5% on top of these standards to still be an incentive. I know you're all waiting with bated breath. This is the full table. And it's got a lot of jargon to it. But basically, if you're a commercial building with greater than 10 parking spaces, you'd need to have 2% of one, 8% of another, 10% of another capable spaces, and 10% of EV-capable light spaces. So there's quite a... Quite a requirement now for installing new EV stations in new commercial, industrial, mostly commercial is really what they're looking at, developments.

Before you move on, do we have definitions for the top? I'm guessing that they're out there.

So EVSE installed space. I can't always remember their acronyms. An electric vehicle, excuse me, it's electric vehicle supply equipment. So electric vehicle charging system or device that is used to provide electricity to a plug-in electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

That sounds like the full station for the most part. Something happened there?

Yeah, so an EV ready is more or less that you have like the conduit, the infrastructure there. Design or designate vehicle parking space that has the electric panel capacity, raceway wiring, receptacle and circuit over protection. So yeah, I can, I'm more than happy to.

Oh, thank you. What it sounds like is the EVSE is actual things you can plug into a car and the other stuff is... various phases of how close you are to putting them in as far as like is the wiring conduit is all that underneath and the like.

Okay. It's kind of interesting that there's four, but there are four levels and we have adopted this code. So this is what, yeah, this is what will be requiring all developments to install.

Why did you say that you need capable of light space? There's a space in light space.

Yeah, a light space, a designated vehicle parking space that has conduits installed to support future implementation and has sufficient physical space adjacent to the existing electrical equipment, that's the light space, versus a designated vehicle parking space that has the electric panel capacity and conduit installed. So basically, if you put in the light space, you'd probably have to upsize your panel. but all of your conduits in the ground. I leave this to the building professionals to make sure that I'm in compliance on.

While we're on the chart, one more question. EVSE installed spaces, is it 2% of spaces or at least one space, whichever is greater? I believe it. For example, if you have 11 spaces, 2% of 11 is much smaller than one space.

Yeah, I believe there's a rounding to it. It's probably a 1.5 up and 1.4 down is pretty typical in the code. I could do a little more digging on that in this document.

If that's the case, then to get to 1.5 at 2%, you need to get to like 75 spaces. So why even have the 10?

I think you're probably required to do something capable, et cetera. One other question on this, too. I guess those are additive, the columns. So you need 2% of the installed plus 8% of the array plus 10% of the spaces are somehow ready to function.

Yep, have some form of infrastructure to them. So this is not so much what I really wanted to discuss, but I did want to show you that we do have a new code that requires spaces be installed. So how that relates back to our conversation is that I'm proposing to, in our parking, in the parking section of our code, to remove that and replace it with this because this is minimum state standard. So defaulting to this. And then adding and adjusting definitions is the last part of the proposed code amendments. So we would be adding electric vehicle charging accessory use. electric vehicle charging principal use, EV charging station, EV charging electrical utility equipment, adjusting the fuel sales retail, like I mentioned, to separate gas station from principal EV charging station. Adjusting convenience store, because right now we only really allow for convenience stores through the definition. We want to do a better job of putting that elsewhere in the code. And then the definition of electric vehicle is existing in the code. We did approach the Environmental Stewardship Board. They had a few comments. We didn't get into too much of an in-depth discussion, but they're interested in updating sustainability standards throughout the ULUC. It's kind of an ancillary item that came out of that discussion. They would prefer that a fast charger be located at every fuel station, which is something in the next presentation, but I wanted to note it here. And then consider EV bicycle charging as well. And with that, I'm happy to have discussion about the high-level items. And really what I'm looking for is any design standards that you feel would be applicable for us to implement with predominantly the principal use locations. And then I can have the conversation with the state and bring back what we hope is a full, thorough draft.

It goes to multi-family residential being allowed there. You're sort of eating up space that you would normally reserve for residential areas, which I don't know if there's any other businesses. I'm sure there are probably small business uses that we allow in the code for those. They're usually one-offs, though, where they're built into little corners and places, not a full EV station like this. given the sort of state of our housing just in Colorado, or at least the metro area, period. I'm not sure if I'm super keen on putting them in a spot that we have reserved for basically more dense housing, if that makes sense.

I'm not sure. What I understand, this is, we have a code that requires a set number of parking spaces with home improvement and commercial. And this is about what those spaces that already are.

I'm talking about principal use, because I think the principal use was allowed in MFR, right?

Yeah, so that's something we have kind of gone back and forth with the state on the zoning districts.

So someone could put a charging station instead of housing.

Instead of housing, yes. Which is... It doesn't seem to fit. Every other one of the zones on there are all commercial zones or commercial mixed use, everything else. The MFR seems to not fit the rest of this. So I'm not too keen on putting principal use ones there. Accessory use, that's fine. I understand the accessory use and the need for that and the need for stations at some of these places, basically every place now, to have at least some of them. But to have a principal, it's effectively putting a gas station in the middle of an apartment complex, which it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

an apartment could easily install a charger in every spot. And their apartment complex is an accessory to have it be a primary use. That's good feedback. Is that coming directly from the model code from the state?

Yes, but I don't mind going back to them and having that conversation. We can bring back their answer at the next meeting.

I don't think our city council is going to like to hear that we're dedicating MFR parcels to primary use charging stations, not with their current focus on housing. So there will be pushback, I think, politically on that. We should start to think about adapting our approach Now, rather than try and push that further. So hopefully the state will understand.

Try to balance which use. Because, I mean, these zones are already meant for housing, not for businesses. That's at least primarily.

It's a commercial use. A primary use of EV charging business is a commercial use in housing, whether it's single-family home or SLR. Those are housing reasons. The state, of course, every community has different zone district descriptors. I'd be surprised if the model code gets down to specifying Littleton's MFR as something in the following. It's going to be a generic zone district types. Are they insisting that multi-unit, multi-family, multi-unit residential be a zone district that these things are put in? I'd be surprised. So, I mean, I'm sure they don't know anything about MFR specifically at the state level. We'd have to tell them that's our district designation for X. And hopefully they would be amenable to say, yeah, you don't have to apply it to that particular district type.

Probably gas stations are not allowed as a principal use in MFR, correct? That's correct. My question are we consistent on that or gas stations are allowed as a primary use or do we have that recommendation that EV charging stations as a principal use would be in those same zones?

So we do not have that recommendation. We actually are recommending splitting two different line items in the table so that different zone districts could, or principal use EV charging could be allowed in different zone districts than gas stations. I'm just not sure I love that idea.

What would be the different districts? Where would be the differentiation then? Like what district would seem appropriate for an EV charging business? that wouldn't for a fuel station? We're going to split them and have different table grid elements. What are you thinking of as the different zone that might be different? MFR?

My guess is that it's basically because gas stations are only, I think, allowed in like, a couple of different districts in our code right now. And this is pretty much anything that has to do with business plus apartments or townhomes or whatever. My guess is EV's got probably a bigger foot, a bigger leeway than gas stations will in our code, correct?

That's the proposal, yeah. Gas stations, you know, I don't want to steal Rachel's thunder, but gas stations are currently allowed in CM, NC. Thank you.

That's pretty much it, right?

Conditional use. Oh, those two are conditional use.

They're conditional use in CM and NC, and then they're allowed by right in IP and EC.

So conditional means they probably need a hearing, right?

They would come before planning.

And these uses would not be conditional, correct? They would just be by right for the most part? As far as some of the ignoring of... buffer screen setbacks and all that, I'm guessing our current gas stations have to abide by them, and these will not, or is that across the board?

So that is only for the accessory station. Only for accessory stations, so not for primary use? So we can implement all of those standards for principal use ones. Yes. And we can build off that to a degree to what principal is the accessory that they want. They want those to be able to be located Fairly broadly.

For accessory use, that makes sense, just to sort of get them up where you need to. I just was concerned that that was a primary thing as well. I happen to agree with the Sustainability Committee that we need to have a discussion on when you start getting credit for things. Now it's five, or is it three, that they start getting bonuses for how much

There's a few different, it kind of depends on what you're building, and then, I can find that here in a second.

You can get back to me. There's a few different tables. To me, it's never seemed like a lot. It's not a big hurdle, it doesn't feel like, for kind of what they're getting. That's just my personal opinion.

six different potential incentives. It's either less open space, greater density, more height, et cetera. And so typically they require, the average is two schedule A items and about schedule B.

So about five items to max it out. Not sure if that's quite enough. for what we're giving them to a certain degree. I know it all gets factored into cost in the end, but I'd rather see a better building built than not, I suppose.

But that's all I have on it.

code to allow EVs to be seamlessly integrated into our city. Shifting to the version of EVs and not enough places to plug them in. But I think, in essence, they are a vehicle fueling station. Fueling with electricity instead of gas. So why should they be treated any differently than a gas station? Just sort of at a high level, asking that question. They are also, in my mind, a little bit of an industrial use. There's power, there's electricity, there's transformers. I don't know exactly what they look like, but there's vehicles coming in and out, parking requirements. It's not that much different than a gasoline station. So why shouldn't we just treat them like we do gas stations? But I do, on the other hand, see we want to limit the number of gas stations. So maybe there is an advantage of breaking them out as a separate code area so they can go in different locations. So they don't have to be in the same locations as gas stations. I'm just kind of thinking out loud here.

One thing, I appreciate the perspective, but it is a state mandate, I think, that they're handing down saying where EV charging for primary use has to be allowed in given zone districts. areas, we had the county to allow them in the agricultural zone districts just in case someone wanted to put any charging primary use along I-70 without having to go through the rezoning process. I think there's that distinction and there may also be, you know, Potential for leaking underground storage tanks. City Council heard a lot about the Costco fueling station and concerns about vapors and health, which may be kind of a different sort of risk that a gas station presents versus an electric gas station. The main one, from my perspective, is the state mandate. They have to be in certain areas. Is that accurate?

It is. We already went to, we've gone back and forth with the state on open space, downtown, a couple other locations, and we had good rationale for why we felt that they were not appropriate in those locations, and we were heard. I'm not sure how much more leeway we'll be able to get.

Just a note on that, in looking at the model code, one of the quote unquote standards that's within the model code is used by right in all land use contexts except below density housing, so if we were to request pulling out multi-family residential, we would have to make the case that we would consider that low density housing. They have a table set out, it's examples, right? A table set out in the model code as to what's considered a low density, what's considered middle, what's considered high, which is so happy for multi-families, and the high density category. So we can ask, but like Jared said, I'm not sure how much leeway that they're going to be willing to give us.

If we have an acre of property in a MFR zone, we could build 30 or 40 affordable housing units on it. Instead, we bought the allowable. We're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot as opposed to the state's mandate for additional housing.

The good news is the state is only requiring us to have the zoning capacity for those units, whether they actually get built or not. That's a really good point.

And the code uses the term jurisdictions have discretion. They have discretion. We have discretion. But swinging multi-families, low density housing, I'm not sure we'll have that much discretion. That would be a tough spot. Yeah.

If they can explain how that ended up in the legislation or provide additional justification, that would be wonderful for us to hear. When it comes back, it's code change.

As I mentioned, happy to have that conversation and bring you more information.

Notwithstanding the allowance for allowing... principal use these stations in different in a broader array of zoning districts it seems that since we have so many gas fueling stations here that they don't really have a problem identifying locations that are throughout the city I mean we just have a different context already built context and say by 70 and you know, east of Denver where you might need to grab some open space or some agricultural use to build those. So within the context of Littleton, I'm not sure that this is applicable.

I just think in the context of the housing needs, to put something like that in their EV code is pretty much sightless on their part. That's just my two cents on it.

It's somewhat contradictory. You have the state, on the one hand, wanting to develop, especially the governor's office, but asking for communities to increase their housing supply. And on the other hand, they're suggesting we allow primaries. I want to underline. Everything Craig said, I completely agree. I don't think you're being devil's advocate there. I think you're being an advocate for something very reasonable, which is these are basically fuel stations with a different kind of fuel. And the same standards we use for fuel stations really, I think, should be applied to these things. No one is questioning. I think the future is going to be accessory use. We see them as accessory uses now all the time. The state is going to get these all over the place. We're going to have beaucoup amounts of fuel for EVs across a number of different types of commercial uses because you don't need fuel trucks or anything. You just have to plug them in, and they can be put everywhere. They don't even need as much oomph, as much state effort to create because of the nature of electrical fuel. It's simple. we should slow roll the primary use, because what that is, in my opinion, is convenience stores. Someone will go and do what they did with Quick Trip. Fuel station pumps are an opportunity to put a really high profit business that's basically selling junk food. You've got 30 minutes to charge your car, come in and get your junk crap. It's a lot like what's so problematic, I think, about fuel stations in any community, in any neighborhood, is they're a very bottom feeder kind of commercial. And so someone will identify IMFR parcel and go, well, the state lets us do buy right primary EV EV charging thing, or we can go through a thicket of rules and difficulty to build housing and maybe break even on the loans. And if I was the business person looking at making an offer on the parcel, every MFR, every housing dedicated parcel in Littleton is going to look like a much faster buck to build basically a convenience store. And that's the reason Denver started reigning in gas stations, because they're kind of poor food hurt the walkability of communities. They're a blight. And so primary EV business, it's the same thing. I think we should not hesitate to question this, like what Craig was saying. I feel that really strongly that we have got to push back. These things don't belong anywhere gas stations don't. The primary use EV charging businesses, because they're basically the same thing. And I'm going to go down with the ship on this with my council members and talking to people. I don't think we should be putting primary use convenience stores for charging plugs on a lot of parcels. It's a bad move from a development point of view for the city. And I think the state, when you go back to them, you really, I hope we can say, Look, the state also wants housing. So do not make us convert precious multi-family housing parcels into convenience stores with some pumps in front. I would argue that you're contradicting another set of state goals and mandates the legislature is giving us. And this session is going to have a whole new slew of housing bills coming forward. The state is a push me, pull you. And so I would ask this department to go. You're contradicting another set of polls from the state. And I think it would be reasonable for us to allow EV charging primary uses in the commercial zones that we allow other commerce. Because these are commerce. When it's a primary use, it's a really commercial thing.

So unlike accessories. Long story short here is if it comes to us with an MFR in it, we're probably going to amend it and take it out. It's kind of what it sounds like.

damn the state at this point because it's like if you're going to tell us that that's ridiculous so that's at least I will we have remarkably few MFR parcels left in the city they're mostly CMU so there isn't a hell of a lot of MFR may I pose a question so I heard that could be in store comment etc would the commission be interested in us you're going back to the state and seeing if we can either remove the allowance for a convenience store, or if you wanted the convenience store, make that a condition component. So still allowing the fueling center with the potential for a canopy, et cetera. The fueling center has a primary use for the convenience store.

Does the state code say that they are allowed to have convenience stores attached by right? I think we have some discretion on that. If we're forced to put them on all over the place, we should definitely traditionally use the convenience store and make that the hurdle to get over. But I think it's better to be very upfront about how we see these things in the community and how we feel they're not appropriate in residential zones, period. I don't even like the idea of them downtown. As Greg was saying, you have a business whose whole job is to draw cars in to our downtown core to go charge. And they go back to I don't know where. That's just a terrible, that's not a great, I want EV charging stations downtown. And we have a few in the downtown. The Elks Club is considering putting in a bunch in their parking lot. We have a lot of parking lots. Put the accessories. But do we want a primary gas fuel station, electrical fuel, dropping in our downtown? We don't allow that right now. And for good reason. So why would we do that with EV?

It's the same thing.

I mean, that's, my pushback is hard on that. I think it's, they're trying to pretend it's some other kind of business or other kind of thing, maybe because it doesn't have fuel deliveries in the underground storage tank, but it's essentially, in my view, the same thing as a gas station.

It is, but the cleanup is also far less. I mean, if you looked into, like, abandoned gas stations and all the stuff they have to do to rip all that stuff out and all the testing, it's, I mean, it's a much cleaner environment. set up and tear down, for sure. But it's still, it's effectively the same thing, as far as like, what sort of traffic you're getting. Operational experiential impact on the neighborhood. And I really don't want to give up MFR housing slots to this.

But I'm not sure I want to give up DTA and DNR either, or DNC. I don't, I mean, I want to see us move. Here's how I see it. I have an e-bike. OK, there's nowhere out there to charge. Primarily, you charge your private vehicle when you have an EV at your own home. I mean, if you have an EV and you come to our downtown Littleton, you don't see the whole point of having a dedicated primary. And I think the business model for this is somebody's going, I'm going to make a lot of money in the convenience store. This is just the draw to get people to come in. It's much like the gas fuel stations we have. What we want is to make sure that our building code, we get more of these accessory uses put in. And when those are abundant, people have them where they were. They can stop by, but they could be in front of Denver Beer Company and see a couple. But I don't know if you want to see like Exxon Mobil EV stations. Just that's it.

It really feels like the only place these things work is on a frickin' highway somewhere where you're running out of juice. I mean, honestly. I mean, it's one of the reasons that, like, I was driving in southern Colorado, and the guy that owns the alligator farm out there, his big EV charging station sign pointed to his place, and it's like, yeah, I know why. Because there ain't nothing around here. So it just feels like the dedicated use is something that you use off the highway as opposed to, you know, in a city. Because the accessory use is going to be available somewhere. I've known people that have bought electric vehicles or leased them that don't have the hookups at home, and they just park it over at whatever ex-business, and they charge it there. So they aren't necessarily putting them at home.

Obviously, the state is going to have us. We're going to have... primary EV charging businesses. And that's coming. It's really a question of what districts we're putting them in. And I'm with Craig that our current fuel station approach is applicable to this primary use EV station. And that's basically my feeling, is that we shouldn't differ. It's fine to have them separate. I agree with separate line items, et cetera. I would really hesitate to start, especially because these are going to be, if I understand it, by right. These are going to be anything that you can go in and just get a permit for directly. is going to incentivize that use over other more complicated business. Putting in a restaurant, probably a lot more complicated than this. And maybe, you know, so what are we doing? We're incentivizing these little mini convenience store EVs primary uses by the states making us have to do them by right administratively.

If they're going to put anything else in besides that, if the way around this is, you know, all right, the EV charging station, fine. We have to do it, whatever. But anything else you put on here, a car wash, a mechanic shop, that all is coming conditional. Because vending machine. It doesn't matter. All of it. You're going to have to come explain that one. But I just don't particularly. That MFR thing was like, are you kidding me? Really? You're going to take up housing, stuff that is dedicated to housing for that? Come on.

Well, when they take a CMU parcel and do it, it's pretty much the same thing too.

So just getting back to the question from staff. So feedback for the state on convenience stores with primary charging stations. Definitely to say, let's push back on that. And can we make that a conditional use? I'd support that as well.

No. It sounds like the intent then would be to make it a harder case to make to take all the film from .

That may be a way to go if we get pushback from the state. Well, no, it's high density. You've got to allow it as a primary use. Well, how about we make the accessory to the charging station things like the convenience store or whatever the other uses are conditional?

One possible better solution for it on the MFR question is to mandate that multi-family residential with 10 or more parking spaces have two or four publicly available commercial accessories installed on their lots. Because when I imagine our MFR parks, we have them tucked in some weird, interesting areas. Sometimes they're, like in District 2, they're north on Powers. You have some MFR deep in the neighborhood. I would hate to see... be charging primary use going there. However, I would love to see a multi-family building, residential building going there, but also have to include, and maybe the state would be happier if we just mandated some publicly accessible access. We're mandating some charging stations anyway, right? Maybe. Probably available. I mean, wouldn't it be as far that they be to publicly available spots, like the ones across the street here from the county building, that they're just not solely tied to the residences maybe that would be a compromise is there anything that stopping someone from going into an apartment complex parking in the ev spot and charging i don't think there is is there there's no way it's not like there's codes or anything a lot of multi-resident it's private property they can have gates and so and all that you have to be available to publicly accessible uh we don't we don't know that like how some of them might have structured parking. Like Powers Place, the one in the Norgren site, is internal structured parking. Or not that one, but there's other ones.

So there'd have to be a way to get into the garage. Yeah, a way to get in there, a way, yeah.

But rather than primary use EV charging stations on MFR, maybe we say that when, so maybe they would accept publicly accessible code requirements that we allow or mandate that there. mandate two or more charging ports, so to speak.

Show them the map of where some of the MFR parcels are, too. They really don't seem appropriate. R2 occupancies, which I'm not a building professional, but R2 occupancies that are greater than 10 parking spaces do also have a ratio per The big deal with a primary fuel station that sells electricity is it's public, commercial. Everyone can go in and just pull their car.

When we have a multi-family residential or any other building that just has charging stations, they're not always going to be available to the public. It could be just for residents. We don't know how those are going to be configured. So maybe they would be amenable to having them dedicated or specified, I guess, as publicly available. You're right, Dan. I think you could pull into a lot of these buildings that have them and use it. But I'm not sure.

That couldn't be blocked by those. Yeah, it probably could at some point. It's going to require a code that they give people that live there. It's going to get to that point probably because they're paying for that electricity. They don't want to give it to just anybody, right?

I don't think it's going to be all or nothing on the allowance of them being public. For instance, the ratio is 5%, 15%, 10%, and 30%. So I mean, there's a large percentage. So I don't think that they would be able to all be accessible by the public. No, no, no. I agree. And I think that what we would change.

But a portion of them, just to try and get around this ridiculousness, is the argument you're making is that can we mandate that they make a couple of them publicly available as opposed to?

That our MFR district code includes some percent of publicly available EV charging stations, rather than our MFR parcels have to be able to become primary EV charging stations by administrative approval, instead that we just make multifamily housing have to include some public charging. San Francisco has an interesting thing where they've made the larger multifamily have to include shared shared car parking spaces. There has to be a few shared car parking spaces in their structured parking lots. So there's like, you ever heard of Zipcar or Turo? So there's a few spots of shared. There's more and more of these sorts. So the residents can not buy a car and just know that there's a set of pods of public cars there. But it ends up being a public good for everybody because anyone can check out on the app the shared vehicle and use it. And so they're putting them in. converting, they're dedicating a small percentage of the parking, the known, demanded, required parking spaces be set aside for shared vehicle uses, publicly accessible. And this is basically that idea that we have a set of EV charging stations that we're requiring in R2 residential. Can we say some of them have to be publicly accessible instead of permitting primary use fuel stations on MFR parcels? Because the goal is to get chargers ubiquitously available. The goal isn't necessarily to create a convenience store primary. We're not trying to create a type of business. We're trying to create an opportunity for people to have publicly accessible charging. And I support that. We support that. We all support that. We want to see that happen. But I don't want to see us incentivizing retail, primary retail.

So it sounds like you're discussing the state, how this could be implemented. There's obviously some conflict between the department of housing and the E.P. charging stations. Do you see flexibility there for them to, for us to be, I guess, in line with the goal?

They have shown the willingness to have the conversations, absolutely. I can't project what they will indicate, but what I can say is I can take both these ideas to them and see what the result is and bring it back to you.

And the thing is, you're dealing with people who are providing the guidance. They aren't the people who are writing the laws. And the people who wrote the laws are the ones that screwed this one up.

Yeah, we have a representative from the state, and they also have a consultant. We've been dealing, we've been working with them. Okay, I have some great feedback.

I just wanted to make a point. I think we've heard, you know, gas stations kind of equivocating to the primary EV use charging station. And so one of the things, just to kind of consider when Rachel is going through her presentation on fueling stations, is that, kind of reading the standard profile code, we are allowed to apply existing standards of these fueling stations to primary EV charging stations, so long as it's not specifically related to gas fueling station impacts. So things like traffic access, flow, lighting, canopies, visual impacts, those sorts of things. One of the things of note that I believe that Rachel may, I don't want to speak for you, but she may bring up is, you know, unfortunately we can't do like minimum distances between the stations, like gas stations or sensitive land use areas, things like that. So just some additional thoughts for, you know, if you come up with any other additional development standards for fueling stations as well. could potentially be applied to primary EV use charging stations.

Except if we came up with a lower requirement, like no station shall be close to each other. You can do that to gas stations. You can do that to gas stations, but not to EV. Not to EV stations. We got it.

Six in a row.

Yeah, I mean, just the logistical distinction of a best case scenario, you're getting a 30 minute time to charge your car versus the two minutes to fuel your car with gasoline. I mean, that sort of logistic distinction comes into play a little bit. But yeah, I just agree that the characterization of a fuel station is apples to apples in terms of a detriment to the development of the city. So the state doesn't want us to turn the whole city into essentially a parking lot for EV charging in the name of sustainability.

I see a principal use EV station more like a Sonic. You pull in and you sit there for half an hour.

It was one thing. I did not notice a restaurant on the uses. Maybe the restaurant's the primary and then everything. There's a restaurant.

Is it really a primary? Secondary or accessory.

Yeah, when I was doing my homework on this and not doing it well enough, I wholly missed this principal versus accessory distinction. The principal thing, to me, coming into this, it's just, wow, that's a really good point. It's wholly ludicrous. I'll allow for electric charting to characterize or be the characterization or something.

Well, you have your marching orders. We're cut out for you in that conversation.

And then circle back to the convenience store thing, too. I just don't know that that changes anything about the characterization of these spaces. Whether you tack on some candy bars to a gas station or not, does it change the physical characteristics of the spaces?

And does the code require a certain amount of DC fast charging or anything like that? Or is it possible that someone could install? If you're trying to do the C-Store model, you probably want DC fast charging. Otherwise, someone would need to be there for five hours.

We're agnostic about the specific technologies, right? Slow.

We have to allow for all three. We have to allow for the DC. We didn't specify it. What do these things have to be? Our current code has a spot that talks about level one and level two, and it omits level three, which is the DC fast charging. So part of this, we wanted to correct that because they had additional standards for those, and we don't see that as needed. But yeah, we prefer to have them installed. They have a little larger equipment, normally transformers, et cetera, but they are far superior to DC. So what's out front here is actually a level one charger. It's not even level two. So that is going to take, that's going to take, the newer cars that have the very large batteries take a day, you know? It's gonna take a long time for you to charge. Whereas the.

So you're saying that a primary use EV charging station. battery of 32 level ones will look like a big parking lot full all day. And we have to allow it by right.

Yeah.

I also think that that's right on Main Street.

That's a little business-wise impractical.

Theoretically, we have no right to stop it if they want to put in level one chargers in 32 spots as a primary use. Scary thought.

It's about 20 hours for you to get to it. 40% charge.

Oh, you got your little extension cord from your vacuumed car.

Any additional final thoughts anyone has of the code? Well, thank you for presenting that spirited discussion to Yeah, excellent.

Thank you so much for your comments. I'm just going to give a little bit of an introduction, turn over to Rachel for this next one, which it looks like we're ready for. So we also found some similarities between EV charging and gas stations. This is an item that City Council has been discussing. Rachel's going to give you a little bit more history behind that. But there's currently a moratorium in place for new gas stations besides the ones that are currently in the pipeline. And that moratorium was extended in order for staff to work on bringing back a draft and working with Planning Commission on that draft. So with that, I'd like to introduce Rachel Veal, our Planning Officer.

retail or gas stations. That's just how it's referred to in the code. We're going to start with the background of why we're bringing this to you and then go to our existing code conditions. And then we're going to go through some different code approaches in neighboring cities and then in other parts of the country as well. And then just have a discussion about what standards and changes we might want to make to our code. Yeah, so in April of 2025, council met during a study session to receive an overview of fuel stations in Littleton. I think due to some concerns, was it around a specific station, or was it stations generally?

Stations generally. There was a quantity discussion.

Yeah. And they had their first reading to approve ordinance 08-2025. to approve a moratorium on new fuel stations in the city. And that was approved on second reading in May. And then that was a six month moratorium. So it was extended in November. So it's set to expire this May. And this was also the moratorium that need be chargers, as you know, were brought in front of the Environmental Stewardship Board in January. So our existing code, as we've discussed a little bit, they are permitted by right in BC Business Corridor and Industrial Park. So they may be built through an administrative application process. They don't need to come in front of any commissions. And then they are conditional use in neighborhood commercial and corridor mixed zone districts. So they would be subject to a public hearing process in front of the planning commission. And they are subject to some additional standards, which we'll go into a little bit later. That'll be the last slide, so you can look at our existing gas station standards. But that's the current state. I believe council has expressed interest in BC and IP switching from permitted by right to conditional use as well. And so the existing stations in the city, No, you're good. We've got 24 gas stations within the city of Littleton and within 1.5 miles of the city's corporate limits. And then you can see this is, sorry, next slide. Green is allowed by right. Purple is conditional use. Some planned developments. have different allowances and restrictions on fuel sales. And if you go to the next slide, most modern gas stations need one acre to develop. So here's the parcels that are above one acre that are essentially developable as gas stations in the city. And then Littleton has more gas stations per capita than surrounding communities are the average in Colorado. So we've got one gas station per 1,900 residents, and it's typically one gas station per 3,800 residents in the state of Colorado.

So if I may add just a little bit to that, back in September, we had an economic development consultant give a presentation before city council to talk a little bit about gas stations and relative numbers, et cetera. So the number for Colorado is substantially different. There are some rural states. that don't have that many gas stations. But we did find in comparing with Parker and Lakewood that we were still high. So just a little more context there.

Yeah, so that's the context in Littleton. And then we're just going to go over some of the ways that standards are applied in other jurisdictions. So one of the approaches is something that we can't do. We kind of discussed we can't do this for EV stations as a principal use. But for gas stations, you can restrict where they are in relation to each other. So in Lakewood, there's a minimum of a half a mile between stations where they are in relation to intersections. So in Arvada, they have to be within 660 feet of an arterial intersection. And you can't have more than two per intersection. And then if you could go to the next slide. And then they have also Aurora, for example, has uses that they can't be near. So they can't be near child daycare centers, hospitals, elementary schools. So there are limits on how close they can be to that. If they can be at intersections with other vehicle-oriented uses in Aurora. So examples of that in Aurora are automobile sales, body shops, repair shops. So you couldn't have a car wash. and a gas station on the same intersection in Aurora, for example. And then Denver, which we kind of discussed earlier, has implemented some stricter standards as well. They have to be a quarter of a mile away from existing stations, as well as low intensity residential zones and RTD stations, train stations, I believe not most bus stations. And there are some exemptions for gas stations that are attached to larger retailers, such as grocery stores. And then we've just got one more of this. Parker also has restrictions. Can't be within 500 feet of schools. Can't be within 250 feet of a hard corner. And then again, there can't be more than two within that hard corner. And then there's also some cities, such as Louisville, that just cap the total number of gas stations that can be in the city. They've capped it at six. And there are some exceptions for, again, those larger retail centers and shopping centers can add gas stations, but they've got a pretty strict limit. And then if you go to the next slide, some cities also have just implemented bans. So these are less common, but a few cities across the United States have completely banned construction of new gas stations within the city. generally are to align with sustainability goals and kind of community character standards. And then there's also additional considerations in gas station standards. There are buffer yards. Buffer yards are already required in Littleton whenever a gas station would be bordering a residential use. So buffer yards are essentially already a requirement for Littleton's gas stations, but There are some cities that implement stricter buffer yard standards that apply to all gas stations. There are some lot standards that other cities have applied. So they set a minimum lot size that gas stations have to be on. Gas stations on average in Littleton are on lots of 1.12 acres. And then there's also some cities that implement special setbacks. And then there's also a few cities that restrict the number of pumps, the number of fuel pump islands. So there's different approaches to this, and there's different levels of specificity that these standards get into. And so these are the main themes across them, though. Yeah, and so then next slide. So yeah. Just in conclusion, our current state is we allow for gas stations in most commercial and all industrial districts. There are obviously an array of standards that have been implemented by other cities. And there are also restrictions across the nation that are kind of coming into effect with gas stations. And this last slide is just our existing code. So you can look at the existing standards in our code. So. What questions, comments do you all have?

Yeah. Just ask me, based on your research, what do you see as the most deleterious impacts on adjacent land uses for gas stations? Is it the lighting, the traffic, the gas fumes from the fueling station? What drives some of these requirements, like it has to be 500 feet from the school or a quarter mile? between stations? I just wonder what the, I mean, I guess it's somewhat intuitive, but.

I think it can be different, you know, when it's a larger fueling station, I think concerns about traffic can come in, concerns about vehicle volumes. There are some gas stations with, you know, high pump amounts and lower prices, so there's always cars going in and out. So I think a neighbor would be pretty opposed to that. But I do think some of it is just character, which is why they're put on certain arterials, you know, I think some of these cities in their approach have wanted to keep character in certain areas that doesn't involve gas stations. But it is, I think, a pretty varied set of reasons why these standards are implemented. I think if it's near residential, lights are probably more of a concern, traffic's more of a concern, fumes are concerns to a lot of people. I think that's probably why they're, I don't know exactly the justification for all of these codes, to be completely honest, but yeah. I think it can be pretty, it can be a really large array of reasons why people come to these standards.

I thought it was an interesting discussion, I think it was with the council when they were talking about why Costco is allowed to have so many or wants to have so many pumps there. And because they're adjacent to a school and certain amount of views and pollution and so on, yet the idling cars waiting for of home may be a worse environmental impediment than possibly waiting to pick up children.

But you know, we solve one problem at a time.

I would be all for it, definitely. All of these need a hearing, for sure, regardless of where they're at. Because I don't foresee, there's not much industrial zone land left that I'm aware of. A lot of it's been converted over. But definitely hearings. I don't know what minutia of numbers we want to get down into as far as do we just do it by feel or is it just a... Do you come up with a set of standards that we have to make judgments by specific to gas stations? For the conditional use?

Kind of like we do with- That's not quite where we're at. We're trying to determine whether we're going to expand conditional use to everything. But that's maybe another conversation. Or do you want to talk about that here?

Yeah. So what we should be using- City council. So city council has indicated their desire to move all fuel stations to conditional use. That's important. So it's something, of course, that you as planning commission can make a recommendation on. But that is some of the conversations we have with city council. That is their interest and intent. What they really wanted, and once again, we talked about the conditional use part of it, absolutely. But what they really wanted planning commission to tackle was, Do we feel that these standards are sufficient? Are they good? Can they be expanded, altered, et cetera? And that's kind of the conversation that they want to have and we're happy to have. And then we're happy to draft language to bring back to you in the form of a potential recommendation.

Well, I don't see this list under E, fuel sales. I mean, I agree with all of them. I think they're worthwhile elements for the code. I don't see them as criteria for deciding about the station's presence in a location. It's more of a where are they located? Which is why I personally, Rachel, thank you for the background on what other communities have done around this question. It's good to see that there's really quite an array of tools being brought to this question. Some of it's physical, spatial separation. Some of it is hazard separation from schools, hospitals, whatever. Some of it is market interventions, just literally banning. I'll tell you my personal opinion. I'm not a fan of bans. I think we want to be a community that doesn't do a lot of moratoriums and bans. We don't understand and know the future needs of any community. So I'm not a big fan of bans. However, I'm going to tell you a story that somebody in the pot industry told me. Pot stores were legalized in this state in 2008, a while ago. Denver took one approach with Denver's attitude about dispensaries, medical marijuana dispensaries. It's kind of free-for-all. There are like 200 plus medical dispensaries in Denver. They're all over the place. Aurora decided to take a different path in Aurora. And they're all struggling. This is somebody who's an insider. There's so many pot stores in Denver that they're all struggling for business. They'll start to look run down. They'll look like really cheap little things. Aurora decided their planning department took a different approach. They were like, let's make it so you can only, let's not have a free-for-all. Let's make it so they can only be so many within a quarter mile of each other. Aurora is almost as big in the population. It probably has as many pot smokers as Denver. But they only have 43. And all of them are doing much better. The stores are getting higher leases. The storefronts are being maintained. This is the story that's told. And there was an advantage for the business owners that the city decided not to let a free wall where there's a block with three dispensaries on it just because they allowed so many. By constraining how proximate all these things can be, you can actually improve the quality of the businesses that you get. And they can do better. And I think that in some ways, that is a model for possibly we could use here as well, which is that we have a lot of gas stations, then they're kind of racing to the bottom and augmenting their low gas sales and profit margins with convenience stores. And that's why. Because there's just so many people selling fuel every five feet. So I'm kind of in favor of the separation so that you make sure that there's service distributed geographically. And we can talk about the pot store question another day. And Littleton has its own interesting I like the idea of a half mile or quarter mile for new stations. I mean, obviously, we have a lot of stations. We have two and three on a corner. I mean, Littleton Boulevard at Broadway is just like a sea of gas stations, fuel stations. We're seeing them coming in other places. I like the idea of just some physical. The spatial separation is a good approach. It allows somebody to find an area that doesn't necessarily have service and maybe get one in there if it's not got an approximate neighbor already selling gas. The reason I like the half mile from a sort of just rational standpoint, a vehicle can move a half a mile very quickly. A half mile in a car is a minute, two minutes, three minutes maybe. So a quarter mile is nothing to a car. That's like 30 seconds down the road. It's not a meaningful distance. If you have half mile separation of vehicles, that's still really a lot of access for someone in a vehicle in terms of how long it is to get to the station. So I don't think of it as a really huge distance.

For the people who are using these things, it's a small distance really in the car. I wonder if that's an effective ban at that point. Of new stations. It might be. Because you're effectively making a ban because you have to live within a half mile of anything else. And since our corridors are saturated with them. It wouldn't surprise me if it is an effective ban.

Bring up the map.

I mean, it may or may not. It may or may not. I don't know. Somebody might find a hole somewhere.

I mean, I think every mile is a lot. Even then, I personally wouldn't mind it being a couple miles. But what may happen, though, in the future is that we see a lot of them close or convert to EV chargers. And then we have a dearth. And somebody goes, you know what? There's now two miles down Santa May without a station. I want to put a new one in. And they can do it because we only have half mile separations. We don't really know the future. I'm just saying what I sense is we have a lot per capita, per area as a community. And yeah, I'm looking at these distances. The big yellow line is Santa Fe down the center. And there's nothing from just south of downtown all the way down Santa Fe to Mineral.

That's got to be more than a mile. It definitely is.

There's room there.

Is there any developable material or developable area there? Because the right side's all railroad tracks, so you can't really do anything. The left side is on the market, Platte River Grill.

They're selling. There's room even in half-mile separations for one or maybe two new stations in there.

I think that the shell on the other side of ACC might be, but that would be, there is a cursor. Yeah, you're right. The ACC shell right there. That's the shell.

It has to be down for maybe even past Flat River Grill.

Yeah, so like Ewing and things like that.

Well, there's a number of open slots where... You know the Angelos Taverna Carboy? That could easily take a gas station in there. It kind of looks like a gas station. Anyway, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad. It's just you have to be creative and look for places. Coal Mine Road also looks pretty empty there. Or, no, Platte Canyon Road.

Gas station locations. These are existing gas stations in the city. The orange dots.

I think a lot of Platte Canyon is not going to be available because it's not CM. There's a lot of residential in that area. Which is fine. When you combine spatial separation.

Oh, true.

So there's the gas station's map. It is, yeah.

There's also one literally across the street from it. There's a lot of gas stations now just outside of Littleton that aren't quite getting it.

And this is a snip of a map, so they might not all be projected on here. Like if I scroll down on the bar on the other side, this is actually also a link.

I think I'm either way on whether we do a distance or a corner or whatever we do. I think just having the hearing process be part of it is probably going to. Another question. Is there anyone who is clamoring to get another gas station in right now since the moratorium has been in place? Have we gotten any big requests for another one?

Right before the moratorium went in, we had one inquiry from an existing business that was thinking about adding gas.

I think I know where that location is. It's a steakhouse now, so it's not happening.

No, that's actually a different one. That was actually before the moratorium. Yeah, but you're correct that that is not like a huge clamoring to get these things up right now, right? We haven't had much since then. I was a little surprised that that one came in, but no, we haven't received many.

The two mandated ones would be Costco and Southwest of San Francisco.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Well, given that none of these rules that we're seeing will apply to secondary use pump stations as part of larger commercial developments like Costco and its subcontractors, set of a fuel station.

We're not looking at rules constraining those kinds of developments. I think that's something we can have the discussion on. Yeah.

That's what I heard, is additional use on all fueling stations. I see. So even... Accessory or whether they're principal use.

Yeah. I think we can have that conversation and come back with a recommendation to council.

I don't believe fuel sales are... Have they allowed us an accessory use? I think they're typically on different parcels than...

So the cost goes on a different parcel. I think probably It's not always the case, but often.

Just looking at the use table, I don't think accessory fuel sales are an allowed use currently.

Yeah, and we do have to remember that our code is from 2021. So, you know, it may have been in the past, but our new standards would have the next principle.

But yeah, I think you're correct.

One thing I want to offer is some of these buffers, and it could be that there's literature out there. There's a gentleman who's very concerned about the Costco gas station. He's advocating for, you know, eliminating that due to health concerns of the winter high school with all the paging vehicles. Yeah, so if there's research... And one thing that I thought was interesting in Denver's was tying into transit. Would we have concerns about, say, Littleton Boulevard could end up being our transit area slash transit center under the transit-oriented community's requirements? Would we want to consider prohibiting, getting to the concern about housing, gas stations, new gas stations, and those types of areas if it's designated as a transit center? Should gas stations even be allowed?

Well, I mean, if we want to put new stations in MFR, then . Just keep it at conditional use.

We can have that discussion. Well, I mean, I see why Denver did it. They restrict new stations proximate to RTD stop stations. I would be amenable to a similar approach here. I think we should look at our transit stations as not appropriate locations for gas pumps. The question may come up that front range passenger rail is looking at two possible station locations along an alignment, one of which would be Mineral Avenue at Santa Fe, where the RTD parking lot is. We already have a gas station there. So if it was a half mile radius, that would probably preclude a new one there anyway. But should Front Range Passenger Road build the station there, or possibly downtown, that would also keep it with a rule that prevents new stations near transportation infrastructure would possibly prevent that along there as well.

Where's the other stop? I remember that there's two in Littleton. I just couldn't remember. We're considering one of two locations from one of their centers. Downtown Littleton? And then general for the use of the parking lot. They'll just use the same light rail. They'll just use the Santa Fe line, are they? I forget what they're doing exactly with it.

It's a bit of a digression here, but the difficulty is that it requires a third platform if we do it in downtown. They can't use the light rail platform, and the freight platforms are over here, so they'd have to carve out a new platform. You'd have to widen the downtown platform area to get a third set of passenger rails in for that. It's heavy rail passenger. Yeah, it's heavy rail. You can't use the freight. The Mineral Station has the advantage of there's more land, already open space where that station exists to put the station in. Both have parking lots, proximate. ACC's parking lot is huge, and slot C is sitting right there. And RTD has a lot, of course, right next to that. So you have those. Those are what, but we won't get two, we'll get one, if we get any.

Ah, okay.

They haven't located the station in us. It's a battle to get it or not. It's very preliminary. Back to gas stations, I mean.

I found the distance between the gas stations to be, it resonated with me less than, say, the adjacency you know, the hospitals, schools, that sort of use-adjacency restriction made more sense to me than, you know, say, if an area is characterized by high-speed auto travel and you have one gas station on the northbound side and one on the southbound side, that, to me, is characterized by auto travel. And, you know, whether it's separated by 300 feet or... That seemed okay to me. If this space is going to be nothing other than high-speed auto travel, I don't see one being the convenience of northbound, southbound is a better business model rather than separating them by a half mile or not. It seemed to be okay to me.

There is a section of Broadway where they're literally across the street, and they're the same Exxon station, and it's just a matter of you're turning right.

High-speed traffic, you're really talking about Santa Fe. That's the only area in Littleton where you have that kind of high speed. That's the only freeway-ish area, and it's a 45-mile-an-hour zone in Littleton. It isn't even high speed by American standards. Broadway, you're not talking about Broadway because that's stop-and-go with lights.

So there's really just, you're talking about a use case strictly. Barely.

It barely exists, where there's people high-speeding through and they need double-sided access to gas stations. And we have that, actually. They're on both sides in the current corridor configuration. But really, we're a city of smaller streets and slower. Even our arterials are 35s. This isn't really a freeway town. The context we're facing is... And my challenge with the use of the application of a... buffer sort of distance from a type of thing, like a hospital or a school, is that we start to, when you do that, you kind of, it sort of assumes that like there's this natural placement existing of such structures, like the school and hospital that we have today is really like the objective ground zero, and gas stations have, when really things like schools move, There's always changes in the environment, the built environment, the commercial environments. You'll see a clinic open for eye care, and then it'll close and become doggy daycare. These kinds of sensitive context places are constantly shifting. And so you can't map the future based on what we have today. Littleton Adventist is a hospital today, but Just down the road, there used to be Marathon Oil, which would have been fine for a lot of gas stations. But now it's residential property. We don't know every 30 years what something's going to look like. So tying it to uses as a criteria is a little less

Reasonable to me than just trying to keep them from jamming up all over the city I would say the only justification for use is you trying to not have Constant traffic in front of a pig to it like with for example for a hospital you're looking for emergency vehicles Not wanting to fight their way through a bunch of stuff that's in there, but they're having to do that anyway I understand any business that I'm just trying to be remarking. I'm trying to see like the the rationale that is not Because I don't even know if you're gonna find a health related but it's it's just a matter of like do you want the traffic around these particular areas that are already could be potentially emergency vehicle high traffic things like that that it's more of a logistical that could potentially be traffic problem yep it's true it's true you should be doing more than gas stations that's our concern of access but really yeah I think that

a lot of that becomes subjective like I think it shouldn't be near a school somebody else might go I don't think it should be near hair salons you know like places like I could take in a very expansive attitude I don't like gas stations anywhere near my house or anywhere right and it's like the context of where I would be sensitive to them might be everywhere so that you're starting to pick and choose what kind of business deserves protection from this evil thing And that becomes very subjective. I like the more objective distance-based standards.

There's a bunch of alarming health studies that stand for those.

That was good coming to it. Rachel, I think I wanted to recommend that when this is brought to council, how we settle this, that I think council should be given a set of options. Restriction level one, restrictive level two. Ultimately, when you get to the, a lot of these questions are subjective. How bad is a gas station to Littleton's character? How bad is it to our school and the kids getting to go That's as much a political question. It may have some research, and there may be some actually hard reasons to say no to these things. But it's really an appetite for gas station-ness in the city. And I know where my limit would be, which would be very restrictive and draconian. But I also think other people in this room would be much more permissive. And I think that this is a question that it would be nice to give counsel I would feel good about giving them a menu of restrictivenesses to pick from, rather than here's our one recommendation, ordinance it or don't. But that was just, when I was looking at this, how I was thinking of how I might approach it. Certainly, my minimum level would be .

I honestly would like to see that more often, period.

In general, yeah.

Just that we get more than. one option of something or two options of something. It's like, here's three or four different ways that this is done. This is what we think is the best, but here are the other ones that we didn't think were the best. That's just my personal opinion on it.

Because I do like a lot of what was in, a lot of these other communities have done some really interesting, thoughtful, they have their rationales, and they've laid out a sort of constraint structure around fuel stations. And I personally think If I was to write this myself, it would begin with, let's not have them all clustering so much. It turns into a real mess on our streets when we have three and four within a block of each other. There's a lot of negatives to that for the businesses themselves as well as the community. So the spatial separation is one I would put at tier one. Then I might also add, schools and the sort of location-specific stuff that Tim was mentioning. That's actually not a bad idea, even if there isn't great research to back the harmful nature of it. There is a lot of in-and-out traffic at fuel stations, and they do have runoff and fumes and light pollution. And then the third might be to take it to a cap. We are going to have 30. so that we're only double the number of gas stations per capita, and we're holding it double instead of triple. There's a point in which I've had citizens tell me, Littleton is becoming the gas station of all the wealthy communities around us. Highlands has six gas stations. Up there at Greenwood Village and Cherry Hills, they don't want any. And they come here and get their gas, pump it out, and then head back to their home. But they're quiet neighborhoods that don't have gas stations. By being so, let's say, open to it, we've just become a magnet for these things. And other communities that want to keep the character have made Littleton sort of the gas station of the South Metro. We're seeing a lot of it. So caps, to me, as much as I don't like caps, I wouldn't, if that political appetite is there for council to completely say, basta, 30, you know, I would give them that option. I personally don't love it.

I buy your idea that sometimes constraining the supply can lead to an analogy of the hot stores. Success for the business. More investment in the properties and then the only way that a new gas station would get in here is to buy one that's maybe underperforming somewhere, invest in that, improve that. So I think I would support the idea of a cap in this situation.

Be careful with that because you start creating a cartel situation where the current owners have a sort of arbitrage where they own the last medallion cabs. And so you can start artificially inflating the value of the market. That's why I tend to just not want to get into that. That's a political decision.

you think there's you do the distance you get you get the same you get the same i think i think no matter what you do you get the same boat as what you're talking about where it's like oh well i've got sort of one of the last two spots that you could possibly ever build one in littleton at least right now is if you want it you're going to pay a premium for it but um it's but yeah i think i think providing providing a menu of things for them to pick from because this I also understand, like, the two that are across the street from Broadway, like, I've used both those gas stations because I just, I was going to work at one point. I was coming home from work at the other point. So it's like, I don't want to make the left turn. There are probably a pair of them up in the street, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, those are the, that's just, it's human nature to not want to make that left turn. And to the point where it's like, I know that, like, they never want to be on the way to work. They, like, quadruple their business if they're on the other side of the street. So it's- Well, the mercy here is that we have all of those gas stations out. Those are not likely to come out. No, I do think, but I do think that something needs to be, we need some sort of criteria to be like, okay, this just, we're good. Thanks.

We have saturation here. In other words, by putting a spatial limit on it, somebody does find a parcel that fits. They're going to use that if it's more than a half mile from the next station. They're going to say, you know, this is a need because we have the nearest ones. But if it isn't a half mile, we're going to say, you know, this is our neighborhood's well service. There's one a third of a mile on this side of the street and a quarter mile there. You want to stick another one in here? You know, we have a rule for spatial distance because we're saturated. And that's what the spatial distance is sort of setting us up for.

Yeah. I like some of the locational. residential zone area. That's a good one. Well, that would wipe out a lot of Broadway's stuff. We're talking new ones. They couldn't come back.

If they burned down, they could not come back. See, here's where I don't like that. Because Broadway should have gas stations. The fact that there's single family homes behind Broadway is like, that's a commercial corridor with six lanes. It's a state highway like If there's a place for gas stations, that might be it. And that kind of, I'm not as big of a fan of the, I understand when we don't want them near residences.

Maybe it's not 250, maybe it's 100 feet. Maybe it's 100 feet.

That could be valuable. That kills them on Littleton Boulevard.

Yeah. Say Pyramid Liquor goes out of business, that's probably not the quarter it makes.

It does. Yeah.

Is that 100 feet?

There's probably 100 feet. Do you want to live next to all that traffic coming and going?

Well, is it the gas pumps you measure from, or is it the convenience store that you measure from? It's the lot itself. Where do you start measuring, right?

Where the storage tanks are.

I think the more that we talk about this, the more that just the spatial, just make sure they're spaced out, makes probably the most sense. And it gives you a natural cap, it's going to, regardless of whether we actually put a number to it or whatever. There's going to be a cap.

Any thoughts on the limit on gas pumps, number of fuel islands? If we adopted centennials, that would outright prohibit the cost go.

We adopted Centennial, but a lot of the existing gas stations in the city wouldn't be currently developable.

Well, now we know how Centennial's doing it. These communities, I love it. Oh, Lettleton's paying no attention.

Yeah, I do think that's an interesting question about being associated with a large retailer or something else so i'm hearing some interest in in that cap of something what was it can you go to the slide with the fuel pump station the fuel station numbers their averages i mean at this point i think every grocery store we have has some sort of

some sort of gas that they're associated with. I know the one at King's, the mineral King Soopers, there's like a loaf and jug down the road that I think is what they've actually tied themselves to rather than putting one in their lot. Not that one.

The one with the close-in kind of things.

Oh. Yeah. Oh, it's after gas station bans. That's what you're saying. Yeah.

It's your veneer at the end. By the way, I can tell you aren't a native by how you pronounce Louisville. Yeah. Just FYI. I am, yeah.

Is it Louisville?

In Colorado. In Colorado it is, yes, it's Louisville.

I only learned that recently myself. When the fire came through, I was like, oh, it's Louisville. You only see it on the map, you think it's Louisville.

Sorry, it's like the second to last slide, essentially.

It's OK. Or something like that. Actually, the buffer yard, that one might be it.

Limits.

On the average, we have four islands. That's 16 individual. Each island has two cars on it, right? OK, so that's the average of. 16 car spots. And Costco will have 32 if they get what they want. They want 16 items. 16 items in each other car.

32 cars. One in Sheridan probably has more like a dollar.

So the model that Costco is bringing is the same as the Green Valley Ranch. If you've been up there just past the airport, or just on your way to the airport, That's the same style of fueling that is proposed or is proposed.

What do you feel like about the number of pumps?

It seems like a big intervention on a commercial venture, naming how many pumps.

I guess I'll go back to some vacant property on Littleton Boulevard and we don't have a limit then.

16 pups.

Suddenly. Well.

32.

I mean, we'll get our buckies on Littleton Boulevard. I'm not sure we have quite the land.

I don't know if we have land for buckies.

Or maybe it makes sense in a context like we could limit fuel islands more in the Bolton Boulevard type areas versus Santa Fe type areas.

Could you do it by how much space they have? Do it proportional to lot size? That might be a way to sort of split the baby to a certain degree.

You have developers who will buy the larger parcel to put in a big pump. I mean, you're shaping the market. Is that a maximum limit?

Yeah, essentially how Centennial's work is for each additional 2,000 square feet that the parcel of the lot area, because they also have a minimum lot size that can be developed on for a gas station. So each additional 2,000 square feet, you can add two fuel dispensers. So they have a scale. You can add more as you get more land, essentially.

Up to eight. Up to eight. To a maximum of eight.

Yeah, so it's not very many.

that's a model for it you know the numbers might change but you can have it scale up as the size of land goes up so a littleton boulevard parcel wouldn't be able to add as many less attached to a big box store of x square footage you can only do eight islands or something like that still allow the supers in the world I'm not hearing that one.

That gave it a lot of traction, though. Once you set the canopy with some steel posts and the cheapest metal roof possible in the middle of the parking lot, you characterized that. You've done the damage. Whether there's 8 or 12 under there doesn't matter. It's the same thing to me.

I mean, there's this imaginary future I have in my head where 16 of our gas stations go out of business because the amount of people fueling has dropped. And they all close. A lot of them close. So what happens is the survivor is the company like Buc-ee's that goes, well, we're going to buy this pyramid liquor and put it in 32 pumps. And that'll just service all the remaining. Well, they all went out of business. So we now are more than a half mile to the nearest. They're all dead. And we're going to put in, so when you don't have the cap, you invite them.

I would imagine we would have time to see that cap. I know.

The cap makes that not possible. Yeah, it does. Who's going to ever invest in a gas station now that they're all going out of business? The only way to do it would be to have a big station making good money on your, you know, tchotchke sales like a Bucky's. Stucky's? Anybody remember Stucky's? I mean, you can see how that, a limit. I mean, I do. I'm fine with limiting. If our neighbor, Centennial, is at 8 as a max.

I mean, realistically, you're shaving 0.72 off. How much are you saving there, really? What do you mean, shaving 0.72? Our average is 8.72.

No, 8 pump islands. See, Centennial restricts you to fuel pump islands up to 8. Our average is only 4 pump islands.

No, sorry. I think I missed. fuel dispensers.

As opposed to our 8.72 average, which is kind of like... Yeah, sorry.

That is incorrect. So we have an average of four pump islands and they have a maximum of eight pump islands?

They have a maximum of eight pumped pumps.

So that would be four pump islands.

Really small gas stations.

Very restricted.

On an island, there's usually two.

But our average is 4.36 islands, which is slightly bigger than that, and 8.72 dispenser pumps. I didn't realize Centennial was that restrictive.

Yeah, four islands, basically. That's micro in today's market. I mean, they don't make them that small.

Yeah, because I think it starts with, like, a minimum lot. If you're at that minimum lot size, you have two fuel pump islands, four fuel dispensers. So you can get up to... four fuel islands, eight fuel dispensers, which is pretty restrictive. I apologize for that typo.

I don't know if we could restrict lot sizes, and if that seems a little bit on getting in the weeds, I don't know.

I generally am not a big fan of getting into specifications for businesses, whether it's parking spaces needed or fuel pump islands that are allowed. I think we want to look at not too much crowding of any one type of business. And that's why I do like the spatial and maybe some of the hazard related distances. Acknowledging, I think we have to acknowledge that we already have these hazardous materials next to schools like Littleton Academy is going to get Costco. There's like, it already exists.

So we're just talking about future. How far is that Sinclair station from Littleton Hospital?

Probably not that far. Arguably, if you're building a school, Like they put in the Goddard School, put in a new school right next to the Andy's Custard. I mean, there's probably a gas station. It's probably pretty close. But when you're citing a school, you choose. You know there's gas stations on Broadway. They chose to put it there. And I don't want to have people putting in a school or a daycare center so they can block a gas station on that block. You could do that if that rule was out. If there's a children's business, OK, quick, put a kinder care up. Yeah, it's like, OK. I think we want to take a hands off about telling businesses how to operate in general. That's a good segue.

So what about telling them they must have DC fast charging at a convenience store gas station, minimum number of DC fast chargers? Because that was a recommendation of the environmental committee. I'd say definitely at least two spots per.

Is that going back to the other discussion?

Yeah, because we're getting kind of the linking the EV discussion. So making fossil fuel fuel stations are required to include EV charging stations or include X number of DC fast charging stations. which I think was the recommendation.

Tied to the number of pumps.

Yeah, it could be tied to the number of pumps.

Or parking spots. Well, council's moratorium and our discussions about where we're going to allow new fuel stations seem to be pretty restrictive. Like, I'd be pretty surprised if we're going to get very, especially if the council chooses the most restrictive option, which is a cap. at our current, or very close to current.

So I want to differentiate between a van and a cab. A cab is a number, right? And so you subtract that.

But I guess it's possible somebody will open a new station. What do we require of these gas stations? Here's my no on that, just to be good. Why don't we make any business that has parking spaces have to put an EV charger? Yoga studio, ballet center, whatever. You open a commercial center with parking.

It'd be good to have an accessory charging station. That's what the model code is already doing. They're already saying if you've got more than 10 spots, you're going to have to put spots in. It was like 2% or something like that, right? It had to actually be hooked up.

That's true. But I think these are fueling stations, so the use is much more tightly knit with EV fueling.

Yeah, if I wanted to go to the quick trip and charge my EV, well, sorry, I can't.

On the other hand. It's like maybe that's just not their business model. They don't want to be. It's a whole other set of infrastructure and stuff to bring. It's like saying, well, you open a pizza place, you've got to sell calzones too. But we don't want to. It's intervening in the model, whatever the person's commercial model is. And we're admittedly doing that from a planning commission.

It's easy to say, you've got to do this. You do that any time you zone a piece of land, really. It's kind of what the nature of zoning is.

All you got to do is fold it in half.

We hit on this a little bit with a quick trip. And they were like, well, we're thinking about it in the future. It's something that all gas stations are considering. if they want to stay in business. I'm not a gas station developer. For instance, they're basically tied to a national distribution, actually. Shell is going to provide you their Shell gas. And there's probably a whole bunch of stuff. They're not franchisees exactly, but maybe they don't have any. Maybe those big oil companies that underwrite or use these as front ends for their sales of fuel don't have anything to do with electrical chargers. And that just adds another $300,000 of cost to somebody trying to open a gas station.

I mean, I don't know.

I'm just speculating with weird numbers. But we're just adding a lot of costs.

We're doing that because we want to achieve environmental goals throughout the region by promoting EVs.

Well, I think we go a long way by having the code make commercial properties have to have a certain percent of publicly accessible. I assume the state model code on EV chargers, those numbers have to be available to public users, not just the development users.

I think in the commercial ones, it would be pretty crazy not to.

Not in the primary ones, but like an apartment building.

Yeah, let's see. I don't know if all of these...

New chargers have to be available to someone who's not the business. Like, I'm opening Kiln, a shared workspace, and I have a bunch of parking spots, and I dedicate four chargers to the people who pay for Kiln memberships. I don't know if those EV chargers have to be available to the public. They have to be there as part of our code, but do they have to be commercially available publicly? No, if it was a gas station, I think they would. Car dealerships have them. You see them, the publicly available ones. But what we're saying is, do we want to make gas station, people who are developing a gas station, who maybe don't have the capital or expectations to serve electric cars? Because it takes up space on your parcel and stuff.

Do we want to make them have to take the same amount of space as a parking spot to be charger? Yeah.

But it's a parking spot you can only use for charging. So their customers aren't going to run in to get candy bars. They can't use that spot to do it. It takes something. But I'm with you. I'm fine. Personally, I am fine with this. With mandating a couple EV chargers at new gas stations.

I will say at QuickTrip, there's an overwhelming variety of junk food and coffee to choose from. It's very easy to spend 20 minutes in there.

Yeah, okay. But we don't get into the business of saying what a QuickTrip must provide. Besides, they're a fuel station use, and they can do a lot of different things on the outside.

I guess that could be, I mean, I'm with you on, what do you think?

mandate EV charters on new gas stations?

That one doesn't resonate as much. The accessory mandate seems like it's... We're going to limit you to two islands.

But if you want more, you've got to put the EV stations in, too. You might be onto something there.

It's a minor point compared to, say, like these sort of global terms of whether we're utilizing a set distance to cap gas stations or an actual cap. That one's kind of an addenda to this, rather than like a global agenda to it.

I guess, Jason, what I was trying to articulate is what we don't want is any more of these kinds of, I personally don't want to see gas stations. I don't even want to see primary and senior charging businesses. I think that's not the way to go. I think that we want public accessible chargers and have them widespread and low impact rather than businesses which are basically super lit convenience stores that have some chargers in front. That's what it's really become. And so gas stations are not great as a Littleton form, and neither are EV, primary EV charging stations.

And so the accessory and making sure that whatever parking standards we have in place absolutely require the accessory.

At least one or something like that, because there's that. I'm still not sure if that 2% actually means that they have to provide a spot if they've only got 10, because 2% of 10 is... Yeah, if we could get back to, because that one, it's like, okay, we have a parking lot we're building that's 10 spots. 2% of them have to have, that's like 0.02 spots.

Even if it's 20 spots, 2% is 0.4 of a spot. So, yeah, there is no, is there a minimum? No.

the ESB, it also has to consider EV bicycle charging. And was that in the context of just the principle or accessory charging or in the context of gas stations?

Yeah, I think it was a touch in the context of charging slash gas, either one. But then I think it was a little bit more of just a broader comment that You know, we're spending some time and energy, in the one person's opinion, we're spending time and energy talking a lot about automobile car infrastructure. And then that person felt that we were not spending enough time talking about charging infrastructure for other means, whether that be your hoverboard, your bike, et cetera. So in regards to that, I mean, I'm happy to have the conversation about those in respect to gas station or EV charging, but if we wanted to do something more holistically, my recommendation would be that this would be a topic that would better be served for the alternative mobility section of the code where it could apply to everything rather than these specific uses. But that's...

Well that table that had the EVSE standards and then the space and light space, like that's a requirement just for electronic, for car chargers. Is there any reason why

If we're looking for fueling or electrical fuel, so to speak, for vehicles, I mean, why wouldn't some, why don't we have a, why doesn't that table include, the state obviously hasn't mandated that bicycle or mobility device be charged, but that table could include a percent of required chargers for.

It could. Go ahead. Now that it is a document, you know, that, that we adopt provided by someone else. Yeah, that's from the model code. Yeah. So, well, that's actually, yeah, from the model code that we had to adopt it, right, for, because it's separate from what we're talking about today. That's like the building aspect is how I describe it versus the zoning aspect. That's why, you know, if you wanted it across the board, I think it would probably be better to put in the ULUC in a different section. That would apply to, you know,

a whole slate of uses. So that table is in what section of the ULDC? So it's not. It's actually in the building code.

Correct. It is adopted that in full the building code and the title .

OK. Do these car chargers, do they have the capability to charge other things? I mean, I wouldn't think it would be too difficult.

I guess they're 220s, though, because they're... You're going to turn your bike in 28 seconds, and it's going to catch on fire. Transformer switch.

I don't know. This is one of those things where it's like the cars are... They have their own hookups. They have their own weirdness that goes with them, right? Whereas... If I have the hoverboard or the bike, I take it into my house, and I plug it in, and I do it. Versus, now, you get to pay for it as opposed to the apartment complex paying for it, I suppose, would be what's going on.

CHRIS JERRAM, JR.: Jared, I sent you a link. But one of the interesting things about bike charger stations is that some of them aren't just posts. some of them are like little cages where you they're like a bike storage that has charges so you imagine you lived in denver or up the river and you you bike down to littleton to go to work and your battery's almost out i mean my ev my e-bike can just make it to downtown maybe halfway back but i get to somewhere downtown like down to two out of my five And it would be great if my workplace had the chargers there. It's not the kind of bike you can, it has a little plug in it, but I can't take the bike up to the office. It's 53 pounds, it's big. It would have to be in the parking garage. You would have these bike cages that you can plug. Now, Littleton's code could say that new businesses have to put in some of these. We've required beaucoup amounts of space for storing cars, right? And we're talking about chargers for the cars. So we could easily say you've got to put in four cages for bikes. For people that come and work at City Hall on their e-bikes but need to get home and charge, it's a similar kind of thing that EV drivers have when they go long distances. But for a bike, 20 miles is... a long distance on a bike, so you can be low on charge. And that's what they look like. They're different ones, they're different kinds, but some of them are, they're not just posts sometimes, but they're like full-on lockers that you secure the bike in, safety, so it doesn't get stolen, and charge it. And that's what we could, you know, I don't, I feel like from an equity point of view. If we're going to require charging stations in commercial parking for cars, we should have some. I agree with the sustainability board member, I don't know who it is, but our code should also provide for alternative mobility devices. Ultimately, It's my view that we get more from a world where we make it easier to not have to be in a car, but to use other options like biking. We get a lot. We need less gas stations. We need less wear on the roads. Battery-powered EVs are really bad for the roads in terms of their weight. So we lower our overall cost. Every one of these bikes, every person that starts commuting on a bike probably pays for the charging station you put in. There's a lot of ways you can frame this question, but we get a lot out of that.

And I think it's worth considering, whether it has to be done in the building code or ULUC, as Jared's suggesting we do it. This thing's state mandated or whatever. But I mean, that's probably an incentive. based thing, most likely you want more. You want less parking spots, put more of these in. You want to go higher, put more of this in.

What the state's doing here is they're wanting to get more people to have EVs. They want to move away from fossil fuel-based cars. So they've put this on communities to make it easier and better for people to incentivize getting an EV, because they have charging stations everywhere. I get that. I'm saying we could do the same thing, and the state should do the same thing for other mobility devices.

That's what Jared was saying, is put it holistically in the parking standards. Make sure there's bicycle parking requirements and maybe specify a certain number of chargers and lockers.

Are we going to be looking at parking standards in 2026?

So that is something that I was going to mention in my update at the end. So I moved the work plan conversation to February 9th. So because I thought having three in one evening might be a coincidence. So I plan on chatting about goals and objectives here in a few weeks.

You're teasing, though. But is parking stuff?

That had not been one. It's not on the agenda for 2026. OK. That had not been one. But we have enough stuff to chew on.

If we put it on that, Jason, we won't be talking about it till 2023.

We've given you enough direction, or we've talked about it enough.

Yeah, sorry to drag it back to the bike plug-in.

I saw there was a lot of discussion in some of the other Cities example some of them require them to be close to intersections some require them to be away from intersections Seems like I always look for gas station on an intersection so I'm used to that's where they usually are I don't know maybe those are business decisions that we should stay out of I mean different to the whole location near intersections The spatial thing takes care of like the number on a corner because you can only have one

You know, you can cat a corner. I don't think it's a half mile. This is a really big intersection.

Can you go back to the Denver's gas station rules? I thought of all of them, it seemed the most, it seemed pretty simple and pretty.

And they were fairly recent.

They were fairly recent. Yeah. A quarter mile from existing stations, low-intensity residential zones. That would be tricky on a lot of our, pretty much everywhere in Littleton is within a quarter mile of low-intensity. That could not be part of our code. Broadway's gone. Anywhere. That's killer. Gas stations within a quarter mile of each other, and then conjoined are exempted. I mean, I don't know if, does council want to restrict? even the ones that are conjoined. And does that work in the context of what you just described? You told me that Costco separated the parcel ownership of the corner where the gas station is to a separate entity. It's a separate. The plat didn't look like that.

It's a separate entity, but it is on a separate parcel. So yeah, I'm sure it's still owned.

The 66-acre was platted, really, they They parceled out that parcel? Can they do that? Or did you just do that internally with the city?

Yes.

It wasn't originally a separate parcel.

Lumen was a single site. It was a single site, yeah. There are some provisions for administrative.

I know we did like a plat. An administrative plat. Not an administrative, but like a plat to basically eliminate the lines inside that zone. So I figured that would just be like it's all owned by one person now. It's all one. What you're saying now is that that's a separate parcel.

But then you can subsequently do some administrative platting.

You can administratively plat it after that? OK. That's how they do it.

OK.

Interesting. And is that true that they've also separated the plats from Portillo's and the other pad retail? They've kind of chunked those out? I'm going to sit and hear that. Okay. Well, no, it's just that what they do is when those become separate parcels, they get locked up for 38 years on leases to Chuck E. Cheese and stuff, and that redevelopment gets really hard.

I don't know.

It locks us in for a long time. Interesting. And King Soopers, you think it's also similarly?

Some kind of a King Soopers on Broadway and Littleton Boulevard. That's wonderful. It's, I believe the gas station is when a separate person ID to double check that.

So it used to be a whole different, it used to be a Conoco or something like that. So those actually are individual, those are separate. They're not conjoined.

It varies from gas station to gas station. I believe some of them are conjoined.

This third bullet point in Denver then would lead a lot of people that, anyone interested in opening a gas station would just open a large retail to get the gas station in there. That's one way to get it in without regulation. I don't know if that's a good or a bad. But since we're seeing a lot of the administrative parcel cutting up the parcel administratively, I don't think that we probably don't even need that second or third bullet.

Quarter mile, quarter mile. There's a magic number with that distance. Because if it's 10 miles from another one, there's no way to get another one. But if it's 300 feet, it's fully effective in restricting anything. So what's that distance? Like, puts it on the edge of, like, maybe one could come in, but not, yeah. Yeah, we'll do some proper analysis on whatever number we come to be all about.

Quarter mile is two to four blocks, basically. So a half mile is double that.

That's too close. I'm a half mile. It's quarter miles for me.

It's, like, way too short of a distance. 1,320 feet is a quarter mile. These are on acre-sized lots already. There's...

Well, I think the other piece to be . I think in some cities, it's obvious that they're saying no to gas stations or any of the characters in town. But there's some that are more or less allowing them, kind of like . So what is the Parker example? What's the ratio per capita? What's the ratio per square mile? And how much is our ratio blowing them out of the water In terms of just saying, why can't we just do a cap?

This is ridiculous. I think I watched that. I wasn't part of this. It was like one of the last meetings before I joined this was that quick trip down there. And I think you had gone through like every surrounding one and were like off the charts higher compared to everybody else around us. So it's like it's not even really close.

That's the argument to, I don't know, just do a cap. I mean, if we've got twice as many as anybody else, I think it's a fair argument to just say, all right, that's enough.

I think we want to frame this to council when you do bring it to them, as we want to bring Littleton in line with Colorado's sort of averages. We're really sort of out of scale in terms of fuel pumps per person. And our cap isn't meant to be punitive or restrictive, but it's just an attempt keep us from continuing to go even further out of line with the rest of the state.

I would probably admit that, say, to our neighbors as opposed to Colorado. Because Colorado, there are the middle of nowheres. It's going to throw that ratio off. It's going to crank it up, possibly. But yeah, if you were to look at our partners or whatever, that's probably a better way to look at it, to at least come close to

OK. I mean, I think the idea of having an upper limit is really because we're pushing our numbers really high. And we want to be more in line with other communities and not be so exceptional around gas stations. They could set the cap below the number that we have. The cap could be 17 stations. So no new permits until eight of them go out of business. That would be the effect, and that would still leave us with more per capita than average. It could be something like that, but framing it as a way to get out from runaway gas station development.

Yeah, I think per capita numbers of a number of reducing towns and per square mile, I think, would be good numbers, good information to make it.

I read the numbers on Highlands Ranch. Our neighbor to the south definitely has very few people. They have very few stations and 2 and 1 half times the number of residents. So some of our neighbors have very, very low levels of fuel pumps per capita.

So I think we look at more examples because that's a . Yeah.

That's true.

You know, they have, you're talking about Highlands, right? Yeah. But they do have very large, it sort of surprised me how few gas stations were there, when you think about it. They have a lot of Lucent Avenue. They've got development all over the place, and big zones, zones for commercial, and there's still very few gas stations.

They can get it. They're coming up here. I feel like you have feedback to work with.

I do, yes.

Any other specific questions you wanted us to discuss?

I think we've covered the questions, standards that we wanted to discuss.

Yeah, absolutely. So we'll get you to work on a draft, and our intent is to bring that back to you in the first meeting of month.

So your goal is to get a council plan and ordinance enacted before the moratorium. Thank you.