Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, and we're live.

Good evening. This is a live stream neighborhood meeting for a proposed conditional use site plan for Pharaoh's American Grill and Billiards proposed for location at approximately 1375 Sherman Drive. Next slide. So my name is Jennifer Hewitt Apperson. I'm a principal planner with the City of Longmont. With us this evening, we have Kristen Cody, senior planner, who is the project planner for this particular property. Danielle Anitson, who is a civil engineer. Josh Sherman, who is our development administrator on the engineering side. And obviously Dallas Stiles, who is our video and live stream specialist, who keeps us all running smoothly. And then from the project team, we have David Modigemi. I butchered your last name, and I do apologize.

No, you got it right.

Okay, great. Who is the applicant and owner of Pharaoh's Restaurant. so this evening's neighborhood meeting is a required part of the pre-application process the city does not yet have a formal application under review and no decisions will be made this evening this neighborhood meeting is intended to be informational for everyone in terms of format staff will give an overview of the process for the required conditional use site plan then the applicant will present their concept plan for the conditional use process Once we have both given our presentations, we would take a five-minute break and instructions for calling in will be posted. If you wish to speak, please call in during the break and get into the call-in queue. All speakers will have three minutes. Why do we do this via live stream? Well, we found that this live stream format consistently allows for broader community engagement. In addition to increased participation during the live portion of the meeting, this format enables us to record the meeting and have it be available on the city's YouTube channel for future viewing for anyone who was unable to tune in live. Next slide. So the subject property is located at the northwest corner of Ken Pratt Boulevard and Sherman Drive. The address is 1350 and 1375 Sherman Drive. This particular property is zone mixed-use employment, and this particular location is roughly where the former Habitat for Humanity Resort was located. Next slide. So the applicant proposes to build a restaurant with a liquor license. Review and approval as a conditional use is required for this project because the property is located within 250 feet of a residentially zoned property. The Planning and Zoning Commission is the deciding body for conditional uses. In addition to the restaurant with liquor service, pool tables and outdoor seating would also be proposed. Next slide. Just as an overview of the process, the first step was to hold a pre-application meeting, and that was held in May. We're now at step number two, which is the neighborhood meeting. Once the neighborhood meeting has been completed, the applicant will be able to submit a formal application for Conditional Use Site Plan. The Development Review Committee, which consists of members of planning staff, natural resources, public works, stormwater engineering, and a variety of other departments will review the application and ultimately a recommendation will be made to the Planning and Zoning Commission. Once staff has completed their review, there will be a public hearing before the Planning and Zoning Commission, who are the decision-making body on conditional use site plans. So I will also note that there will be notices mailed and posted at two more points in the process. You received one for the neighborhood meeting. When the application is accepted for review and deemed sufficient, there will be another notice of application under review sign posted, and there will be another round of mail notices sent to property owners within the designated radius area. Prior to the public hearing before the Planning and Zoning Commission, there will be another set of signs and notices advising as to when the public hearing will be held. This is, we do take our public notice very seriously here. Next slide. With that, I'm going to turn it over to David, who's going to talk a bit about the Pharaoh's Restaurant and the concept as it currently exists.

Thank you, Jennifer. And thanks everyone involved for all the effort you all have put in to hear our case for this proposed project that we have in mind. To begin with, we are currently an existing establishment at 380 Main Street in Longmont. We started operating I believe March 1st, at the end of February, 2025. And this past year has been amazing. We've had amazing customers and people and employment, and we've been very pleased with the results. Our next phase is to consider expanding our business as we've had great success where we are, and we're finding that perhaps getting a larger place with better parking facilities, what have you, would allow us to bring in not only local customers, but bring in a lot of people from outside of the area, which then would be a good thing for, um, Longmont and getting people outside of the area acquainted as a lot of the pool players will travel miles and miles for the tournaments and leagues and the events. And, uh, sometimes they even travel from outside of the state to come in, uh, as we've had several, um, events happening last year with national champions coming into our, um, to our facility. So next slide. Okay, so in here, you'll see some pictures of our existing facility. On the bottom right, you see a picture of Rodney Morris and Corey Duell. These are the two top national players, pool players that have visited us at least two or three times. And every time they come in, people from all over the state will come into Longmont, stay at a hotel to watch their performance. So our basic business model is to be focused on the game or the – want to call it a sport but believe it or not pool was in the olympics one year and so it has a lot of aspects besides being a game um and so that's our main focus we we do not Mix that with other types of recreation. We do have a few dart boards for occasional visitors who don't play pool. But beyond that, we're all about pool. And as you can see, we have a lot of pool tables. Currently, we have 20 pool tables. They're pretty tightly spaced, especially on league nights. It gets pretty crowded. So our basic model is very healthy activity. We don't allow gambling. We have quite a few families that bring their children. It's definitely a game that the earlier you start, the better you get. In fact, the world top champion, which is Gorst from Russia and Joshua Filler from Germany, the two of them, they're only 23 years old. They both started when they were five or six years old, started playing pool. So it's not unusual to go to a national championship and seeing a few children standing on a stool to get to the pool table. And believe it or not, some of them are amazing. So we're not a rowdy place. We're not a place where you have a lot of heavy drinkers. And we've proven that we've been a pretty safe place for people to come in. In fact, on the day we were getting our certificate of occupancy, sometime in February of 2025. Mark, who is the head of the fire department, was giving us the certificate of occupancy approval. He said, well, I hope you're not like the last business. And I said, what do you mean? How was the last business? He says, well, we had calls every week about fights. Well, we haven't had one In fact, we haven't even had any customers raising their voices or getting in a sort of aggressive mode in the year and a half. So we're pretty proud of that. Okay, so next site, please. Okay, this is a 15-second video. It gives you a little feel for the facility we have right now. It's a pretty short one, but it gives you a pretty picture of what the crowd looks like and how our setup is. Okay, thank you. So as you see, we have a very mixed age group of people, and so they come in from all types of professions, and it's a really good crowd. Next one, please. So we've decided on this particular property because potentially we can grow the space down the road into the full 11,000 square feet, which will give us close to 30 tables eventually. Initially, the project phase one is to occupy and develop the first 3500 square feet north side of the building. And once that particular section is operational and running in conjunction with our existing space, then we can take a look at seeing if we want to expand out to the rest of the building. Currently, there is a short-term renter in the other 8,000 square feet, but they may not be there for more than six months to a year. So that gives us time to develop the first phase. This particular location has got easy access to Kent Pratt, which is the main highway that connects Boulder to I-25. So it's very convenient for people not only from outside of town through I-25 to get to us. We have quite a few pool players that come down from Fort Collins and quite a few from Denver come for our tournaments. Um, it's also, uh, we also have a good crowd of people from Boulder that visit us every week, uh, sometimes several times a week for, for our leagues. And so that's also very convenient to the access to Boulder. All right. Next slide please. Okay, so as you can see, this is a map of the building, and I've shown in the red the main interior area of where we propose phase one of our project to be. And then the blue area, the blue lines indicate where we propose the outside patio to be. So we originally had it in the back on the west side of the building, but then we decided that having it closer to the commercial area on the east side of the building would probably be better for the neighborhood. And it's also not a bad place for us in terms of access. So we've also wanted to address some of the concerns that neighbors would have in terms of noise. Obviously, our focus is playing pool. We're not a concert hall or a nightclub. Most of the pool players would like to have a soft music in the background. Any type of loud music or different type of music that may not go well with pool uh is discouraged so we we basically don't need to have any music outside in the patio area and so very rarely anybody could even hear the music even if they were outside of our our building uh within 10 or 20 feet so that's uh that's going to have a very low impact as far as the neighborhood can Next slide, please. Okay, here on the left, you're going to see the very north side of the building. And currently, there's a chain link fence. That's the area we propose to put the patio further to the west side. And we're going to put some acoustical privacy wall. And there's a couple of sample of them that are shown here. The patio is going to be covered. So it could also be used in a winter time. And on the very right, you can see some samples of patio cover structure that we may be looking into. Next slide, please. So this is a concept of what we plan to do for the interior. It's at this point a concept, but it's a very doable concept based on the space that's provided. As you can see, the kitchen hood back there, it's an open kitchen type of a concept with the bar about 20 feet away from the back wall. Behind this wall where the kitchen is, there's a very large storage area, which could be used for additional kitchen facilities, storage, dishwashing. And as you can see, to the right is the patio and the eight foot privacy wall that would protect the neighborhood from any sort of noise from people being outside, having loud conversations or what have you. And we are typically closing our pool hall about 11 p.m. Last call is about 10.30, 11 during the week. And about 12.30 is when we close on Fridays and Saturdays and 10 p.m. on Sundays. So the patio is generally going to be closed about 10.30 p.m. So this is a face-to-face. One of the projects, the first 3,500 square feet, you're going to see on the right, there'll be some pool tables, some seating area, and your bar. That's predominantly what we're going to have in this section. But there's also going to be bathrooms where you can't see to the left of the bar. That would be sufficient for the space we have and possibly more. But down the road, if we do expand and need more bathroom, that will be dealt with them. Okay, next slide, please. Okay, this is basically a concept of our outside patio. As you can see, it's a very pleasant, nice environment for people to sit out and enjoy the beautiful Colorado weather most of the year. And... The entrance that you see here with our sign on top, that's on the very east side of the building. And so the lighting and illumination is not going to disturb any of the neighborhood. And on the back side, you will not see any lighting in addition to what there may be a few floodlights for safety reasons. Next slide, please. Here you see the very west side of the building where it's facing the residential neighborhood. And there will be no activity there. I think there may be a couple of floodlights that are existing. We will not be adding to that, but you're gonna need some lighting for security. And the very front you see is the AutoZone building, which occupies 8,000 square feet of the total 20,000 square foot facility. And also notice that there's all the parking in the back of the building as well. On the right, you see the building as it is now that is looking at it from the opposite side of where you saw the previous picture before. So if you may imagine, this is where the kitchen would be. You're looking out towards the entrance. And next slide, please. In here, it's the picture of the building as you see right now, the east side, the entrance. To the right, you'll see the chain link fence. That's where we're going to have the patio. The signage is going to be on this side, and there'll be no signage in the back of the building. And to the right, again, that's a picture we saw earlier, which is the west side of the building. Next slide, please. Okay, here shows another angle of the building from the corner of Ken Pratt and Sherman. The front of the building is AutoZone. They are long-term renters, but it gives you a kind of perspective of how big this property is. It's approximately 1.8. It may be 1.7, I'm not quite sure, but it's fairly large. And there's parking all on four sides of the building. A parking, according to the lease, is shared. But the majority of the traffic for our pool hall is going to be probably between 7 to 10 p.m. That's when they start rolling in. Typically, even if you come into our pool hall today at... let's say two o'clock on a Friday afternoon, there's not gonna be a lot of people. You may see only two or three tables or four tables that are gonna be occupied. So we basically have most of our traffic, customer traffic in the evenings after six o'clock. And at that time, pretty much that whole area is, most of the businesses will be closed. So we will have ample parking. not only for our own weekly customers, but also for if we have any tournaments or visitors that are coming from out of town. Next slide, please. So this is what actually our operating hours are today, and we're going to keep that pretty much the same. During the weekdays, we close at 11. Friday and Saturday, we stay a little longer. And Sundays, pretty much we close at 10, even though at 9 o'clock, the place is pretty empty. And the patio, we... We'll keep it open no later than 10.30. So that's our plan. We don't plan to put outside speakers, no outdoor music, no parties, no gambling. And it's going to be a nice family recreational place as well. People will bring in their kids. We'll have lessons for them. And it'll be basically a very safe, pleasant environment, recreational environment for the people of the town. Next slide, please. So why we think that this project would be a good fit for Longmont. Again, currently, the way it is with our business, We're pretty tight in space, so we we can accommodate, especially on weekend nights, the local people that are coming in. But if we want to have any big events, it's just it hasn't been possible to do that because we don't want to give up our. our space that local people require to these events. We want to make sure that people that are here locally have access to our facility all the time. But this particular location will give us plenty of space where we can accommodate both. Next slide, please. And here, I think we've gone over the overall goals of this project and to basically summarize everything, we're gonna be a quiet business. We have controlled hours. We have a nice patio with privacy walls and we'll have extensive parking for our customers locally and coming from out of town. So thank you very much for the opportunity for me to present this concept and goal and hopefully something that could materialize. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.

Thank you so much, David. All right, Dallas, I can have my slides back. So we're going to move into the public comment section. So we just have some general ground rules for public comment. Some of them go without saying, but the main ones will be three minutes per speaker. We do follow city council rules. We ask that you state your name and where you live. We also ask that you keep your questions and comments related to the current proposal. So with that, next slide. All right, Dallas, I'm going to let you go through this one.

Sure thing. So right now is the time to call in. That number is 1-888-788-0099. The meeting ID is 869-4153-7579. We're going to take a five minute break here for callers to call in. See you in a few.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have just about under a minute on our five-minute timer. If you are watching the stream and would like to call in with a question or comment, now is the time. That number again is 1-888-788-0099. The meeting ID is 869-4153-7579. We will bring it back in just a little bit. Okay, that was our five-minute timer. Jennifer, we have no callers or questions.

Great. Well, thank you so much, Dallas. If I can get the next slide. and so just for the next steps as i indicated earlier the next steps after this will be submittal of an application followed by review by the development review committee ultimately there will be a public hearing process public hearing before the planning and zoning commission who are the decision-making body following that would be any necessary building permit review and build out next slide All right. If you have any further questions, if you have any questions after we sign off, please contact either Kristen Cody, the senior planner who is managing this project, or David Modigemi, who is the applicant. With that, I would like to thank everyone for attending this evening, and good night.

Thanks, all. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jennifer. Wonderful. Thank you, Dallas, Josh, Kristen.

Thank you.