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Planning Commission Members June 10, 2015 City Council Members c/o Consulting Planners WSB St. Anthony Village City Hall 3301 Silver Lake Road St. Anthony, MN 554189 Re: Case for Carlson Family at 2926 Armour Terrace This summary is to state my support for the variance requests to both items due to practical hardships created by conditions other than the applicant’s sole doing and control. As former chair of the Planning Commission we often discussed the need for compensatory opportunities to be recognized for residents to improve their properties, even if the hard surface coverages percentage already exceeded the arbitrary but common use of City 35% lot coverage. This percentage has been passed from community to community, like a free download, without critical analysis of the sites, locations in the city where practical and impractical and without the necessary update from the engineering side of consulting work to determine if the City has adequate storm storage to increase the percentage either by neighborhood or as a blanket change. In this case, the applicant was not instructed by staff to accurately measure their property, nor was there conversation as to mitigation opportunities. This is a hardship to the practical solutions the City has claimed partnership with the Watershed on in newsletters, demonstration projects, grant applications and in sustainable leadership claims. No options to homeowners for modest increases in site coverage to improve property values, drainage pace and site design are discussed, offered by code or in text. It should not be prohibited by the use of a just say no, take the money, its your right to ask use of professionalized applications. WSB does feature in their home offices storm water solutions, permeable paver use, claims for innovation in design to their clients and has demonstrated that work for St. Anthony. In this case, and in other future cases, there is no work plan to provide equalized treatment of a common restriction. Solely penalizing property owners by providing no options for trading hard surface is a practical hardship not caused solely by the applicant. Many other planning firms, codes in other cities, watershed district permitting all recognize the give and take of redevelopment and property improvements from space and building designs of previous decades to today. They offer compensatory solutions and ways to measure their real and perceived impact and allow reasonable change to occur via a permitting plan. There were no restrictions on site coverage when this lot was created. The neighboring property and grade changes effectively create reasonable and sustainable buffering for the consolidation of pool equipment. The City commonly strives to hide and legislate mechanical equipment from view and in design and site neutral locations. Their application does that. 33