11-28-2007 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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Kathy Glanzer From: Steve Benning [steve @rimlake.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 2:09 PM To: Kathy Glanzer Cc: kevin @sfadvance.com Subject: Whispering Pines Dear Kathy, Could you please forward this email message to the members of the City Council for their review prior to our meeting this month? I am sending this email to address the development, Whispering Pines, located on Labore Road. With excitement we are glad to have the recommendation from the Planning Commission to approve our variance in the cul -de -sac length and the preliminary development plan! We are happy to work with the city and neighbors to make this the best development for the city, the neighbors, and for our company. Before the City Council meets this month to review the Planning Commissions recommendation to approve the Whispering Pines development we would like all City Council Members to be aware of the following: The Planning Commission has recommended to increase the cul -de -sac length an additional 40' from our proposed plan. It is my understanding that some of the reasons (not all) for this recommendation are: 1) Allow more room between the houses being built. 2) And to allow for more trees being saved between the homes. 3) To have a better "road side" appearance on lots 2 -5 by making them approximately 10' wider than they currently are shown. As a developer, having larger lot sizes is always an advantage, never a disadvantage. This being said, I still believe it is better to leave the plan as we submitted, 86' frontage, instead of increasing the lot width's of lot 2 -5 to 96'. We currently have lots 2 -5 approximately 11' wider than the current minimum lot width of 75'. Here are the reasons why we don't believe it is in the best interest of the City to widen these lots: 1) During grading there will need to be a shallow valley between each home located on lots 2 -5 to provide adequate watershed from the homes to the back infiltration area. So, even if we widen the lots we wouldn't be saving anymore trees between the homes due to this grading process. 2) By increasing the width of lots 2 -5 we are moving the lots further North into the heavily populated mature pines on the North end. This causes two concerns for the developer: a) Anytime we cut down a mature tree (50 plus years old) it is impossible to capture its size and importance to the scope of the land even if we replace that tree with a 20' tree matching the species. b) These large pines trees are interdependent on each other. It takes a "group" of pine trees this size in order to maintain their health and survival during wind storms. By cutting down these mature trees another 40' we are compromising the likely hood that they will be here for us to enjoy the next 10 plus years due to wind storms and health as a "group ". We want to stress that we are willing to work with the City of Little 1