Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

Then we'll get started I guess.

So today is the Board of Zoning Appeals for August 10, 2026. This is the call to order. Christy D'Angelo present. Tim Nikich present.

Eric Dunst present.

I don't see anyone else here for public comment so I'm assuming there is none. The only action item we have is the approval of the minutes from the from last month's meeting, so I will move that we, for approval of the minutes from the July 13, 2026 meeting.

I'll second.

All in favor, aye.

Aye.

All right, and then we are moving on to new business, which is an update and discussion on the new zoning code and the changes that will impact the Board of Zoning Appeals. I'm gonna turn it over to Charlie, I assume.

Yep. I have kind of a presentation on the code itself, and then Megan has some information on your process.

Perfect.

Thank you. So yeah, we wanted to just, the new zoning code was approved on July 7th to go into effect September 1st. So before it goes into effect, we just kind of wanted to go through some of the changes so you guys can kind of be familiar with it. So it's the new code. The existing code has 75 subsections to it, and some of those are very long and convoluted. So the new code hopefully is organized in a way that will be much more user-friendly and a lot easier to understand and use. It's divided into 12 sections. 11 on this screen that have been approved so far we do plan to have the subdivision section that's currently chapter 23 of the city code that'll be added in later hopefully in the next couple months so as of right now though we have 11 sections of the of the zoning code. The ones that will be most important for all of you for variances are the zoning district standards and then the use standards. The development, design, parking, landscaping, all those sections, for the most part, they're new Standards, which had just been designed guidelines that the plan commission. Would use in its review process, and they've been added and codified. So. There's a little bit more certainty for people and then each of those sections. Including some portions, which were in the old code. And which would have come to you for variances each of those sections has a sort of a built in. Exception standard, where if somebody wants an exception for many of those design standards that the parking standards, those will go to the plan commission. So, so those will, they have a little bit lower of a bar. For approving their, their kind of exceptions and unit for approving variances. So that'll. It'll take a few things off of off of your plate. The district standards of the ones that you will be still reviewing, district standards are regulating where things can be built. So they'll have descriptions of each of the districts, and then they'll have tables for lot sizes, setback minimums, height, and things like yard encroachments and height exceptions. They also, each of the sections, including these ones, will have diagrams to sort of help people understand the wording of the code and to make it a little easier to use. There's a lot, there were just a few in the current code and there will be a lot more in the new one. So this one on the right, this is showing how the setback minimums apply to yards. So it's each of those kind of colored sections around the outside of the yards are showing a setback area. And the one that I kind of wanted to highlight there, we still have front yards, setbacks, rear yards, interior side yards, and then now there's a new category called street sides. So interior side yards, that'll be most of the side yard setbacks that you have where there's two properties on either side of you. Those will be your side yards. Uh, but in cases where there's a corner lot or where there's a. A lot with double front edges that has in the past been just classified as a street yard and that leads to all sorts of confusion when it comes to. You know, people wanting to build on corner lots. That will be classified as a street yard or street side yard in the new code and there will be some cases where there are different standards for those and there are for regular front yards. It's not going to make everything. Super easy to do on on corner lots will probably still see some variances for those, but it will hopefully make things a little bit easier for people. As far as the districts themselves, One of the biggest changes in the code was to reduce the number of districts we have, at least for the residential districts, from nine down to four. So you can see in general, the districts on the left, those are the current ones. They're divided out by single family, two family, multifamily, and then each of those has different, you know, has several different districts within those divisions, and they're generally being combined into four residential neighborhoods, which are just residential neighborhood one, two, three, and four, There aren't any districts that are single-family only. The RN1 district, Residential Neighborhood 1, will only allow single-family as a principal use, but it will also allow accessory dwelling units. If people want to have a mother-in-law suite over their garage or in a basement or something like that, they'll be allowed to do that in any district. And then the other districts will all allow at least some duplex, triplex, quadplex, and larger numbers of uses in those districts. And again, it's it's generally, but not exactly as it's shown there. They're being combined that way. There are some some areas where. You know, some areas of the. Existing RS3 single family district, which fit more in the RN3 residential neighborhood than the RN2, but generally that's how it is for commercial districts. It'll be more if there isn't as much change, they'll kind of stay the same, but we've we've changed it to. More descriptive titles where you know right now it's the B5 community business district. It'll be just the CC corridor commercial district, so they're there. We've kind of taken out the numbers and. I have more descriptive names for them. Each of the districts we add will have tables for the setbacks and for a lot. Lot sizes. Hopefully to build a little bit easier to to find them going into the the zoning ordinance for each district. And the sizes the of the lot sizes and the setbacks that are allowed have been reduced quite a bit in the current code. The smallest. Minimum lot size is 8000 square feet. And pretty much any lot in the central city is going to be smaller than 8000 square feet so that. that led to a lot of substandard lots and a lot of nonconformities. So we've reduced those minimum sizes. The smallest is 4,500 square feet. And then lot widths from 65 feet to 40. The front and what is now the street side setback from 25 to 15 feet. Front-facing garages will still have a setback of 25 feet, but in general, for the front of a house, it'll be able to go up to 15 feet from the lot line. Side yards are reduced to 5 feet. rear yards to 25 feet and there are in the current code there are a bunch of exceptions baked in things like deck setbacks where they can be reduced or porches on the front side most of those are going away because pretty much every house will be have a little bit of area to expand if they want to so and then we the current code has Setback exceptions for substandard lots. Those are also going away because we're basically reducing the setbacks down to what they would have been for the substandard lots to any and. We hopefully will have a lot fewer lots that are substandard. Um, the use standards are also broken out by tables now, instead of. Instead of by by district, so you can see here all the residential uses in a table for in the residential districts. The number of the districts or the uses themselves are. Sort of a lot more descriptive there there. different standards for different types of multi-unit uses, as you can see here. And then each use has, or not every use, but a lot of them have what's called a supplemental standard, which you can see the table is referencing another section of the code. And that's where there are standards that are more descriptive, there's a little bit more detail for what is required for those uses. And the supplemental standards will be coming to the board of zoning appeals for variances. Still, so that you might be seeing some things that are a little different there than you have in the past.

Can you give an example?

I do have a couple for not for residential, but for commercial, the residential standards are. It's, you know, it needs to have a window on the front side of things like that that tend to be. they i guess they will come into play for building a new house but they're a little bit simpler than some of the commercial ones this is just breaking it out for commercial standards as you can see they're organized into public and institutional commercial and industrial that doesn't necessarily the categories aren't necessarily the same as the districts there are some Uses in the commercial standards that are only allowed in the the manufacturing districts and vice versa But they're organized that way in the in the tables and then also later on in the code And in general the idea is to replace the use standards that we have in the current code where there's a ton of detail but You know, sometimes if there isn't, if there's a use that is not listed, then it's like, how do we get how do we allow this? There are more general. Uses the general retail general service. Heavy industrial light industrial that are more broad and that. It should allow flexibility for. sort of unique uses or new uses that aren't contemplated in this code to be approved in the future without having to go through a really detailed process. And then one of the sort of the results of that is we will not be having use variances anymore. So, as you might remember, use variances, the standard is so high that it's pretty close to impossible to for you guys to improve a use variance. As long as I work for the city, I've only seen 2 and in both cases, they were. People just trying to delay code enforcement and. And they were ultimately denied by the board. So it turned out we didn't have to have those anymore. So. You'll only be reviewing dimensional variances from now on. So, going into those supplemental standards. The examples on the left on the left is a food truck court. These are both standards where there's. There's a lot of supplemental standards. You don't have to read through all these, but. This is just laying out the number of food trucks that have to be, you know, this is a new type of use. So we have a lot of standards for it. Number of food trucks, clearance between them, the area for each one. requiring that they each have an electrical generator or an electrical outlet so you don't have generators for each food truck, that there be a restroom facility on site. So those are all the types of standards that somebody will have to meet if they want to open up this new type of use, which is a food truck cork. And if there's a lot where somebody can't meet that, then it would come to you. On the right, The standards are for an auto dealership. And most of those are also. Are also related to the dimension to the site, but there are some that are. That are operations related, so an auto dealership, because of that, it has to be a conditional use. And that would go to the plan commission. The plan commission can add on additional conditions, but all those ones that are in this list would have to be part of the conditional use approval. So those portions of that wouldn't necessarily come for a variance, but the other ones potentially could. One of the things that we see, I'd say the vast majority of variances we get are related to accessory uses on single family homes. We just have a lot of single family homes and a lot of people want to put in things like sheds and garages and Our current code is organized in such a way that it makes it maybe overly complicated. We have. In the current section, 22.58. It's divided into general regulations with a grand total of 2. And then specific regulations that are broken out by. that whole list of things there. It's sort of every time we've had a case where we've realized we didn't have a regulation in the code, we threw in a new specific regulation, and it's very complicated. So the hope is that the new standard will be a little bit easier to use. This is a similar, there's a use table with some supplemental standards for different types of accessory uses. But there are a lot more things that apply. Generally, the dimensional standards for accessory uses will apply to all accessory structures. And you might remember in the current code, There's a requirement that they have to be in the rear yard only, not in the street yards or side yards. You've probably heard that before. Can't take it more than 20% of the rear yard area. Those are both at least partially going away. They will be allowed in side yards, just not in street side yards or in street yards. So you probably will see some variances still about locations of accessory uses, just not hopefully quite as many. Um, and rather than the 20% of the rear yard area, there's just a total aggregate area of 1500 square feet. That's allowed for accessory structures on any lot. Regardless of the size, so 1500 square feet is is. quite a lot of area, and we feel like that's enough for the number of structures that you could have. And we don't want to have the case where people have a small yard, so they have to come to the Board of Zoning Appeals for a couple of different accessory structures if they want to have one. We do also still have five-foot setbacks. as we have but specifically for garages there's an exception to that that if somebody wants to rebuild a garage that's existing they can build it along the if they're if it doesn't meet a setback they can build it still in the same place and they can actually extend it if they have to along that lot line where it doesn't meet the setback so that that exception's baked in so hopefully we won't have as many variances for garages For any lot that's basically for every lot that doesn't have an attached garage, they'll be allowed one large enclosed accessory structure, which is meant to be a garage. There's no maximum other than that 1,500 square feet. So, we will probably get some very large weird looking garages. We're hoping that. The benefit of of having more flexibility will outweigh the downside of people. Doing stuff that's sort of ridiculous on their lots, but. In addition to that, every lot will be allowed two smaller accessory structures with a maximum area of 200 square feet. So that encompasses sheds, chicken coops, playhouses, any other kind of accessory structure that is closed.

Plus, that was in the middle. Can we just somebody to build that for me and put it in my yard? Wouldn't that be fun?

Yeah, sorry. Plus you could have 2 open accessory structures. So the 1 on the left is still a playhouse, but that's open. Pergolas have become a lot more popular, gazebos, things like that. Any of those would be an open accessory structure, so you could have up to four smaller accessory structures if you wanted, and two larger open accessory structures of more than 200 square feet, so larger pergolas. If somebody wants a carport, we've gotten a lot of requests for those. The current code doesn't allow them. And there isn't really a good, you know, there isn't really a reason that you could justify a variance for that. You know, if you can build a carport, you could build a garage. So that's something that people have wanted that we haven't had come for variances. So as long as it's a permanent structure rather than like a tent, those will be allowed. Fences are a thing that you guys have seen a lot in the past, and the new code hopefully will cover them in a way that's a little more clear and easier to understand. The current code has very long descriptive standard for them. The new code has just several tables for where they're allowed, what kind of fences are allowed, and how much How much the opacity is but all of these are not in the accessory use standard? They're actually in the general development standards so In all likelihood you won't see fences at all anymore because that would be reviewed by the Planning Commission if somebody needs an exception and They'll have that a lower a lower bar to me to grant that exception The same goes for driveways, which I think you've seen quite a bit of in the past, where people have driveways that are on very narrow lots. It'll be a smaller setback, and any exceptions to that setback will go to the Planning Commission as well. Nonconformities. are not really changing. There's a whole section on that that lays it out a lot more clearly in a much more organized way than the current code does, but it'll be really the same as it has been. It will be something that might come into play a little more since we'll have a whole A lot of structures which have been built recently under the old code, which, and now we're on the new code, so it won't be a 25-year-old nonconformity, it'll be a one-year-old if there are any. Hopefully we won't have all that many because we've been trying to reduce the number, but there will be some most likely. Really, the big idea for that is just if a user structure was allowed by the old code and it was established before the new code goes into effect, um and but isn't allowed under the new code it's considered to be legal non-conforming you don't have to change you don't have to rip it out and move the building over just because the new code happened so that's that's really the big idea with the non-conformity there are a lot of complications when you get into specific types of structures and buildings and hopefully the Code will help deal with those. I have a slide for questions, but I think Megan has a slide as well. Sure, I guess, yeah, if you guys have questions about the code structure or those parts, about what I went through.

So my question is, so the old code is entirely gone and this is completely replacing it? Yep.

It's replacing the entirety of Chapter 22 and Chapter 27, and eventually, hopefully, Chapter 23 with all of this new section.

Okay, that's great. That's a lot of work.

It sure was.

That's all I had. I have none.

All right. Oh, I'm good. All right. Doug, I don't know if you want to switch to.

Okay, then we'll switch over. So I'll just speak really briefly. Charlie talked about a lot of the ways that the number of cases are going to decrease, but for the cases we still have, we're developing a likely similar procedure for the findings of fact. On the screen right now are our current findings of fact. These are taken verbatim from the current code, and there's four. In the new code, this section has six findings. Everything that is highlighted yellow is either verbatim from the old code or a similar idea worded slightly differently. So you'll see that the vast majority of these concepts are identical to the current code. The only new ideas, if you will, are that the variance will not alter the essential character of the area. and that the variants will secure public safety and welfare. We're still working with the city attorney's office to, if we want to condense these a little bit so we're not voting on six individual findings of fact, but still working through that process and we'll be ready for the September meeting with these kind of two new ideas, but very similar to what has been going on in the current code.

And that's all I have, if you have any questions.

Yeah, I don't. That's OK. So they may look slightly different when we actually see them in September, though.

Yes. Yep. Still working through the final draft. OK.

In September or whenever you get the next?

Whenever our first meeting is?

Yes.

Maybe it'll be like next year sometime. No, all good. Looks like this is going to help a lot. I mean, more for the plan commission, but that's their problem.

And the hope is some, you know, some projects that they would review now that smaller things or or things that are that they would clearly approve without any comment will just be able to be approved without going to them. So.

Oh, so that'll clean up on their end too then. Hopefully. Hopefully. Excellent. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Is that everything? All right. I think we just need, I'll move to adjourn the meeting then. So moved.

I'll second.

All right. Favor?

Aye.

Anyone want to stay? Thank you, everyone. Appreciate your walking us through that.

Thank you. Yep. Thanks for coming in just to listen to us.

Oh, it's good for us to know.