Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

and we are at the Canyon Community Center for the May 20th meeting of the Springdale Planning Commission. Good evening and welcome to tonight's meeting. I'm Terry Kruski. I am the vice chair of the Springdale Planning Commission. The chairman is out this week, so I'll be running the meetings. From the town, we have Tom Dancy and Niall Connolly and April Red... Sorry about that, Abel Redes, right? And Kendall Sager. And on the diocese here, we have Rich Swanson, Paul Zimmerman, Matt Fink from the National Park Service, and myself, Terry Krushke. So I think we have a quorum. We're ready to go, right? Absent, oh, yeah. So absent is Tom Keniston. Kosh body Melissa LeBourne and Jennifer McCollum who is the chairman So do we have a motion for approval of tonight's agenda I move Second motion by rich second by Paul all in favor rich. I Terry I all right We are ready Does the town have any general announcements?

One item in relation to action item A2, we had proposed at the last meeting that we were going to cancel the June 3rd Planning Commission work meeting. We're proposing not to cancel that. There's a design development review that needs to be reviewed at that. Yeah, so that no longer needs to be an action item.

Okay, so the town will have resources available for that meeting then? Yes.

Penalty on the play, I already made plans.

Sorry. Any other announcements? Okay. Does anybody wish to declare any conflicts with today's agenda items?

No, I don't see that.

Okay, so for tonight's agenda, we have, well, now one action item, which is the public hearing for a transient lodging overlay zone application. And then additionally, there is a consent item to approve the meeting minutes from the March 4th meeting. So for the public meeting, I'd like to just... We'll go over a little bit here, some of the rules. The rules are on the back of the agenda if anybody wants to review them in detail. There will be opportunities for the public to speak and ask questions during the public hearing. We will announce those points in time. And anyone wishing to make a statement, please come to the podium and speak into the microphone. We ask that all attendees register at the back table there so we can have an accurate representation of who is here and who is speaking. The public comments are generally limited to three minutes per person.

And so I think we're about ready.

So the first item is a public hearing for the transient overlay zone application at 975 Zion Park Boulevard. I believe, Niall, this is your item. Do you have a presentation for us?

Thank you. This item is for a zone change and a public hearing, as you indicated. The applicant is Mrs. Trista Rayner, and she's applied for the transient lodging overlay zone to be applied to her property at 975 Zion Park Boulevard. The property is in the central commercial zone and so it's eligible for the transient lodging overlay zone. The application window for the transient lodging overlay zone comes every two years and even years during the month of March. So we had the application window open recently during March 2026. The town received one application, and this is the application that you're reviewing this evening. The property, I'll just pull up an aerial view. The property is currently developed with Mimi's Cafe at the front of the property. There's a second restaurant building behind that which is vacant and there are also six townhomes that are used as vacation rentals. The proposal involves demolishing this restaurant building at the rear that's vacant at the moment and replacing it with a new building that would house four transient lodging units and two long-term rental units. And the application includes draft plans of the proposed new building. So the commission should review the application to determine whether or not it promotes the aims of the general plan and the purposes of the transient lodging overlay zone. The commission should then make a recommendation to the town council to either approve or deny the application. I have a few just points for your consideration before handing it over. The transient lodging overlay zone chapter of the code includes application standards and also review criteria. So the application standards are more kind of quantifiable, what makes a complete application. And then the review criteria are more qualitative questions about, you know, does this proposal meet the vision of the general plan and supports the general plan's vision for transient lodging. The applicants provided responses to those questions and they're in the staff report. Secondly, the overlay zone requires one long-term rental unit for every four lodging units. And so, you'll see that the applicant is proposing four nightly rental units and two long-term rental units. So, because they're exceeding that by one unit, there's an extra long-term rental. Their application requests that only one of those units be tied to the restrictive covenant that both of the units would be long-term rental units, but the chapter, the code requires that the long-term rental unit that you use or that is implied in the transient lodging overlay zone can't be tied to the transient lodging unit, so it can't be used as a property manager or that kind of thing. So they're requesting that the second unit, because it's not actually required by the code, would not have that restriction on it just in the event that they did want to have a property manager there. Two public comments have been received. One of them was included in the application pack and then the other one was forwarded this afternoon. And then finally, the application pack includes drawings showing the proposed building, however The eagle-eyed commissioners may have noticed that one of the elevations is missing, and I apologize for that. But just for your reference, this is the missing elevation. So it's in the same style as the others, but I just wanted to bring that up because I had omitted to include that in the PAC. So I'd be happy to answer any questions. Obviously, the applicant is here, and she's ready to explain her proposal too.

Would the applicant like to make a presentation?

Hi, Trista Rainer. I'm the owner at 975 Zion Park Boulevard. Thank you for accepting my application and giving me a chance to talk to you tonight. I had a submission in 2024, the first year that you guys had the TLO overlay meetings. Anyway, we took all the input and feedback we got from the town meetings into this new design. So we really listened on scale of building, style of building, making it more harmonious with the surroundings and having more parkitecture and landscaping. So I hope we accomplish that too. the suggestions that were made last time. Forgive me for reading a couple of these, but it'll be very hard for me to get through my thoughts without a couple of notes. This building is currently vacant on the property, and for those of you who may not be familiar with our original application, this building, although wonderful, was built with aerated, recycled concrete. does not lend itself to remodeling or adding on or changing. Like if we even took a window out, we would have a problem with the building. So although that was excellent for for the building initially, it is not able to be like remodeled into something differently, which is why it's been vacant for so long. So we hope to rebuild the vacant building on the property. Like I said, more park like architecture with rock metal and stucco. The design elements include replacing the large, it's a modern building now with very large windows, massive windows. So our new design elements include smaller residential windows, as well as the added expense of building an internal breezeway and internal walkways, which we hope will benefit the night sky ordinance by not having these outside. This new building also has stepped back walls. That internal breezeway in the center breaks up the front facade. And there's numerous patios and balconies to create more open space rather than a very large box type building. For those of you who aren't familiar with our property, it slopes significantly from SR 9 down to this property site. So the new building pad is actually eight feet lower than Zion Park Boulevard and five feet lower than Mimi's Cafe. and three feet lower than the adjacent canyon offerings property. So with this rebuild, we feel that the natural skyline and vistas will be unaffected and the new building will blend in more harmoniously with the surrounding properties and buildings. The redesign gave us a larger TLO residential unit, but it also gave us an opportunity to build a second much needed residential And on that being a long-term rental Potentially housing we don't have an on-site manager now. I oversee everything personally But in the future should the need arise that gives us an opportunity maybe to have an on-site manager, which would be which would be great The two residential units make up 43% of the living space and Each residential unit is 916 feet and will feel more like an owned space versus a rental. We intend to have upgraded amenities, private laundry facilities for each unit, patio and balcony spaces, making it as residential as we can in the commercial zone for those residents. We've also taken extra efforts to build to do the rebuild design facing away from our most adjacent neighbor, which is Laura Doty. So the building faces Juniper Lane. You would enter through the center, through the breezeway, and then go into the internal corridors. The backside will be first story and second story will be residential units. So those will back against Laura Doty's property. And additionally, we put our utility and storage closets adjacent to her residential so that there would be minimal impact for her. In fact, it'll be much better than the current zoned use. for her and she's very happy with that. If you haven't had a chance to look at her letter, her letter is excellent. If maybe I could even read it, she couldn't be here tonight. With our current lodging, just to give you some information about us, we choose not to maximize our occupancy on the property to lower the impact on our property and on town resources. Our guests love staying in the center of town. The biggest compliment we receive is that they feel like locals staying in the community and supporting our local businesses. That's a really unique opportunity to provide residential style rentals to both long-term residents and people visiting. It's pretty unique for the downtown area. Most of our car guests do not utilize their cars during their stay, which is an added bonus. They even walk to the park, which I think it's too far to walk, but they do walk to the park. Our goal is to provide a variety of mixed uses on the property, so we built 18 Town homes in the back which were sold as residential townhomes. We have a residential overlay on the property and Half of those I'm happy to say are in turn rerented out to local workers, which is awesome We're trying to do village scale protecting Springdale and avoiding the consumptive tourism by not building two ordinance maximums. This proposed building size is 38% smaller than X, which are two bedrooms. Those count for 12, I suppose, plus four. All of that is 20% lower. The transient number of units is 20% lower than the town ordinance as well. We have a unique opportunity to bring this mix into Springdale's commercial core. It's very important for workers to be able to live in town. We employ many people who commute from out of town, so we're excited to provide this opportunity of two residential units. Bringing the residential and small scale lodging also supports our local businesses, which is needed year round. This also supports Springdale locals and workers by having businesses there. Our property is 1.18 acres and modest in scale when compared to other properties and central and village commercial. Can we go back to the Mimi's overhead or aerial view? Great. Thank you. So, um, the town homes that are in the back have a 1000 square foot footprint. Each Mimi's cafe has a tooth out. The building Mimi's cafe building has a 2000 square foot footprint and the rest, the second restaurant building with the patios, I believe it's, It's close to 4,000, maybe 3,700. We're proposing that to be $2,600. So it'll be, or $2,600, 2,600 square feet. It'll be a smaller footprint than what's currently there. We've done our best to try to maximize the ability to remodel that building and it just isn't going to work. So unfortunately, starting over is really the only way we can see that we can develop on the property and not have a vacant building. All of the plans will not affect any sewer water. Most of the connections are just to the right of the building in the driveway. So further down to the right, like next to Mimi or next to the vacant. Yeah, no, well anyway, just to the right of the vacant building along like where our trash dumpster is. is where the, yeah, that's where all the sewer connections are so we don't foresee any closing of the road or impact to infrastructure with this rebuild. The building in the central commercial zone and even comparing it to buildings in village commercial, we have less density for transient lodging. Our buildings are also smaller scale when compared to Soul Foods, I think their building is 12,000 square feet. The new Zion Guru building is, I think, 7,000 square feet and a 5,000 square foot footprint. All great buildings, I'm just pointing out like size differences. The building it's most similar in style to is probably Laura Doty's building built next door. In fact, if you added a second residential unit to Laura Doty's property as it's being built under the TLO application, it would be very similar in size to what we're proposing. Let's see. Part of remodeling the building would give us an opportunity. We would like to have an opportunity to have a revised landscaping plan. There's a lot of hardscape on the property. We've proposed like a more formal bike. stand station and maybe rest area with a drinking fountain possibly, and also the possibility of electric charging stations if that's something desirable by the town. We think both would add to the walkability of that downtown area, give people a place to stop, maybe go have lunch while their car is charging, and support our local businesses. I think that's it for me. I look forward to hearing your feedback, and thank you for your time.

Is there any questions for the applicant? You mentioned it's a remodel. You're not trying to stay in the same footprint with my impression. You have to remove the building and replace it.

We're going to remove the building and replace it, but it has, if you can see on the left and right, there's patio, restaurant patio spaces, and those would be reduced. So it's essentially the same footprint, but it'll be smaller. We're trying to put the building exactly where it was to minimize impact, but the footprint will be smaller overall than the restaurant space with the patios. Is that what you were asking?

Yes. Okay. So I see there were stairs in the back, and I believe there's an existing basement in the building. The intent is to maintain the existing basement?

Yes. It wouldn't be cost-effective to try to fix that, so that'll just be used as additional storage, maybe laundry facilities, something down the line. Yeah.

So there's no plans for public or client access to that area?

No, no, not at all. No, none.

And it looks like from the drawings, you're planning this similar parking arrangements as the 2024 request?

Yes. And there's two things about parking. We have, I think, 42, 41 parking spots. more than sufficient parking for two restaurants or this proposal for transient lodging in the restaurant. But in 2022, the town took away street parking and our parking, I don't know how many of you, a couple of you were at the 2024 meeting, taking away that street parking made it very hard for our disabled patrons. Also, it's not obvious where to park for Mimi's cafe. So what we're proposing and it doesn't have to look like this We've been having discussions with the town about this could be smaller. This could be one-way traffic a lot of We can make we definitely can have more landscaping and less less asphalt in this area but what we're trying to do is move our handicap parking and a few spots closer to Mimi's cafe and then even though we're still, the ratio of landscaping to building is still within the ordinance, what we'd like to do is revisit what we have on the property as a whole and perhaps add more landscaping where parking is not gonna be utilized anymore, in the back perhaps or along the side. So. Yes.

Some of those will come out when we do a design review. Yeah. That'll be the same.

This parking is not subject to us doing the transient lodging. We'd really like to do this for Mimi's regardless. We need to have parking closer to our building. We just have not moved forward with it because it seems like it could go in conjunction with this and not have two major remodels on the property. We do need to have that parking sooner or later closer to Mimi's, but that's a separate. We have enough parking in the back to satisfy this application, if that makes sense.

Yes, but I tend to agree that having parking closer to the restaurant would be useful.

Yeah, my own father-in-law can't come to Mimi's unless I drive on the grass.

It's a long walk for my mother.

It's a long walk, and it's uphill both ways.

The hand drawings that you've shown as your conceptual architecture didn't have any dimensions on them, but you've mentioned now you're planning about a 2,600 square foot footprint for the new building on top of the basement. First of all, I'd like to thank you for coming back and for your thoughtfulness and the time you've spent on this. We do want our commercial properties to be successful and match with the goals of the general plan. Overall, I think this is a much better proposal and I'm going to compliment you on your efforts in coming back. One of the things I find very good about this proposal is sort of the new design approach to the building itself. If we included, as we make a recommendation to the Town Council, if we included a potential condition that the building follow the basic design you've presented here in terms of square footage and that, do you feel you're far enough along in your decision making that you can stick to this basic design?

Yes. Yeah, a lot of thought went into it, especially with putting the residential units in the back. Something that I forgot to mention is there will not be any common walls with this design with the interior corridor, which is really great for the residential units as well as the transient guests. But yes, a lot of thought has gone into it. only thing that I talked ideas for rock and stucco but that was just as a general example that we would definitely come back with something you know very similar to what we proposed today yeah I had a question I know you were a little bit late in sending out the request for or the notices to your neighbors and that have you gotten any response back from We've gotten two. One was from a resident who lives in the townhomes that we developed on the property. And that was in support of it. And then the second one was from Laura Doty. Okay. And- So those are the two that I think- Comments, if you don't mind, because you didn't get to see Laura Doty's letter. She has several points in support of

Do you have her letter on that? Yes, I do.

She has several points, but of significance is especially item number two. The location of the existing building doesn't lend itself to retail or restaurant commercial since it's not located directly on Highway 9. It lacks visibility and vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Lack of visibility is a death knoll for these types of businesses. That's my thoughts exactly. We've tried three different restaurants there, and it's just very difficult to get, especially without the parking in downtown Springdale. It's really hard to get people walking down something that looks like a residential street.

Trista, just to let you know, the commissioners have that letter there.

Oh, okay, perfect.

Yep.

It seems very favorable to your cause.

I'm sorry?

I said it seems very favorable to your cause.

Oh, yes. There was one other thing I was going to bring up. Now it's escaping me right now, but did you have any additional questions for me?

I have one question, but it might be more for the city. First, I do want to thank you for the effort you put into this. It really shows.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it. And I fully understand your reasoning for only having the restrictive covenants on one long-term rental, which I have no problem with except I just got confused. The rule is for four transient lodging, you need one. Is that my understanding?

That's correct, yeah.

So what happens to this extra long-term rental? Because it doesn't have a restrictive covenant. Could it become a transient?

No, so it would remain a long-term rental unit. It would just be exempt from... the requirement that it couldn't be tied to employment on the property. The way the transient lodging overlay zone was drafted with this requirement for long-term housing, one of the stipulations was that the long-term housing couldn't be tied specifically to The transient lodging units as far as like what we're building one unit for an employee for the transient lodging business so Both of the units would be long-term rentals available it's just one of them would would be subject to this restriction of the code and then the other one that's over and above the minimum and therefore not required and would be long-term rental, but it could be rented to whoever they wanted.

I think the specific wording is that long-term housing units required by the section must be open to the public. What you're wanting to do is have the second one be confined to, not necessarily to the public.

Not be restricted to that or limited to that.

It could be open to the public, but that would be your question.

And, you know, every meeting that I've ever listened to or been a part of that talks about housing says there's a shortage, and we just saw this as an opportunity to provide another residential unit. Like I said, we don't have a property manager, but if we did in the future, this would be an ideal location, obviously. If a housekeeper, for example, needed housing, We could offer that if somebody from Mimi's Cafe needed it. There's a couple other restrictions with the TLO residents. It has to be no less than 90 days, which is interesting. I don't foresee doing anything but 12-month leases, but if somebody was building a home in town and needed a house for 60 days, this gives me an opportunity to rent to somebody. Like if I have a space in between where I could rent seasonally to a ranger for 90 days, I could do that. So that just gives us a lot more flexibility, but we do intend to use it as a long-term rental.

And maybe retail, maybe not employees, but... And it does sound like you're sort of locked into both of them being a long-term rental. Yeah. Which I appreciate, and the thought you gave and your reasoning is very sound, so thank you. Thank you.

Are there any questions from the public? No? Okay. I think we're ready. Motion to go into public hearing. I move that we go on to open the public hearing.

I'll second the motion.

Motion by Paul, second by Rich. All in favor? Rich, aye. Terry, aye. Paul, aye. Any comments from the public?

No? Seeing that we closed the public hearing.

Okay. I'll second. Okay. Motion by Paul, second by Rich. All in favor? Rich, aye. Terry, aye.

Paul, aye.

So we can go into now it's commission deliberation. I guess I'll go ahead. No, go for it. I was going to say overall I think this is a very good submission. And in general, I think it meets all of the goals that we have for the overlay zone, the transit. And I'm of a mind to go ahead and recommend approval, but I'd like to hear any other comments.

I would agree with all those comments. I could see the thought. I think it's beneficial. It looks like the small... town feel the building you know being smaller shorter down the hill i think it's uh it's a good design it looks reasonable for what we're after like you said i think it's beneficial not only for the you know the extra lodging but i think it also helps the restaurant mimi's which i think is great yep okay yep i mean i i agree i'm i think it it uh it all looks good the only um

The only negative or less than positive thing, but it's not disqualifying in my mind, is that we're going to lose some open lawn area that's kind of nice to look at in the center of town. You're going to have a parking lot there instead. Sure.

Yes. Come up and make a comment. We will.

It's really hard to visualize what that landscaping is going to look like. This is just a draft and by no means our final proposal. We hope to make that parking lot smaller and maybe one-way traffic if UDOT and the town will allow it. But what I wanted to point out is we have 145 feet of frontage along SR 9. And that space there is 5,000 square feet of landscaping. You don't see that when you see that big black asphalt parking, but that's 5,000 square feet of grass and landscaping and shielding. Also, that parking lot is 45 feet from SR 9 and downslope. I understand the concern and I am not excited to tear up any grass, but anyway, a lot of thought will go into the design of that and make it accomplish what we need to with the parking, but also be conscious about what the town needs and not taking away any more green space than we have to.

I commend you for that. That's great.

Thank you.

Any other discussion? Can I have a motion?

Do you have a motion?

Do you want me to do it? Can I do it as chairman? I can do the motion, can't I? You can. Okay.

You added something on there which I like, and that's why I'm letting you do it.

You're going to let me do it? Okay. All right. The Planning Commission recommends approval of the application by Trista Reiner, to apply for transient lodging overlay zone on her property S-MMIS-1-975 Zion Park Boulevard as discussed in the Planning Commission meeting dated May 20th, 2026. This is based on the following findings. The transient lodging overlay zone application furthers the land use and town appearance goals in the Springdale General Plan Specifically sub goal G that new lodging facilities promote spring the transient lodging Overlay zone application meets the requirements of the Springdale land use ordinance title 10 article F regarding transient lodging overlay zone requirements We have a couple of conditions or actually it might have a third one here first that the that the building footprint of the final design as submitted for design development may review a will be approximately 2,600 square feet as reported. And this will, with some small leeway, like a 5% leeway or something for necessary changes. The second condition is that the final design submitted for the design development and review must include varying external wall panels and exterior design elements as shown in the drawings. And the third condition I would put in is that one of the two long-term rental units must have the required deed restriction and the other one does not require the deed restriction. Is there a second? I would second that. Motion by Terry, second by Paul. You cut in just before you. Discussion on any discussion or... Thoughts or changes? No, you count all the points. Thank you.

Okay.

I think we're ready. All approved? Rich, aye. Terry, aye. Paul, aye. Application, we will recommend approval to the town council.

Thank you.

All right. The second action item, I guess we are going to pass by that one. Do we need to officially vote to say we're not going to do this?

No, I don't think so. You don't need an official vote, but you may just want to, for the record, say we're not going to. We had potentially considered canceling the June 3rd meeting. We're not going to consider that, so no action is necessary. Okay.

So for the second action item, we were going to consider canceling the June 3rd Planning Commission work meeting. We have decided not to cancel that meeting, and the town... staff has indicated they can be prepared for that meeting. Okay.

With that, I move that we approve the consent agenda.

Motion by Paul. Second.

Second by Rich. All in favor?

Rich, aye. Terry, aye.

Paul, aye.

All right.

We have approved the meeting minutes. Can we get a motion to adjourn? I'll move that we adjourn. Second. Motion by Paul. Second by Rich. All in favor? Rich, aye. Terry, aye.

All aye.

Thank you, everyone. Good luck with your project.

Yeah. Look forward to seeing more of it.