01-30-08 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES CITY COUNCIL JANUARY 30, 2008 only three businesses with more than 60% of their property in outdoor storage. He also pointed out that the businesses would have to comply with all other conditions of the ordinance. The City Attorney commented that outdoor storage is always an issue for cities. He indicated that the City can establish the amount of outdoor storage allowed by whatever means as long as the regulations are uniformly applied. Two issues of consideration are can the City enforce its ordinance and are the ordinance provisions reasonable. Blesener felt that 60% was reasonable given the City Engineer's report. He also felt that this amount of outdoor storage provided property owners with full use of their property. Keis felt that the outdoor storage enforcement problems that the City has had were related more to what is being stored rather than the size of the storage area. He also noted that the process to try to bring properties into conformance has been horrendous. The City Administrator noted that owners in Ryan Industrial Park have asked the City to get tougher with code enforcement. The Administrator indicated that the City will make fewer requests for compliance and will be quicker to issue citations. However, even with quicker issuance of citations, the process will be a long one. The Administrator noted that another issue is that some of the CUP's are too specific detailing exactly what can be stored. Some property owners are finding their businesses to be out of compliance with their CUP when a piece of equipment is replaced. The Administrator noted issues that were discussed as needing to be addressed include the maintenance of traffic aisles in outdoor storage areas, height restrictions, and amount of outdoor storage allowed. The Administrator also suggested that the City define what is to be included in the outdoor storage calculation. The Council discussed the licensing of outdoor storage, and the City Planner indicated that there are a few cities that have this licensing. McGraw asked if the City could have a sliding fee scale that would lessen the fee if a property were continuously in compliance with its CUP, but increase the fee for code enforcement issues. McGraw suggested that the fee could be tied to the amount of time that City staff has to spend on code enforcement. The City Attorney replied that there must be a nexus between the fee and the cost to the City. He suggested a base line fee that would increase based on additional staff time related to the pai•cicular business. 11