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Should the applicant offer ways through grading or rain garden solutions to detain water on a walkout lot in exchange for additional hard surface, this should be given standing as a reasonable compensatory planning area. Having a code which only allows the City to gain and claim credit for regrading City property to create dead storage of storm water is a practical hardship to each property attempting to make changes to their home sites in meaningful ways. Having no credit for permeable pavers and other innovative grading techniques that slow water and allow for modest infiltration that are also prominently featured at Silver Lake Park and many other facilities in the City is a hardship to this application and all our residents. It is again a practical hardship that the City has not taken the time nor effort to place the common and affordable solutions for storm water into the work program for the planning commission, the consulting planners or engineers, given the knowledge that so many properties are higher than 35% in their permitted and as built conditions. The hardship is certainly not because the lots are too small, we have taken pride in the quality and diversity of lot sizes and housing types. The City is encouraging in pamphlets primarily to its residents to improve and maintain their property. The City storm water system takes into account the pluses and minuses of the existing drainage in sizing pipes, the most recent storm ponds, the use of central park for new storage and several of the park spaces for retainage away from home sites. Our code does not specifically prohibit solutions from being recognized, it just doesn’t specifically offer a menu of solutions in ordinance. Much like a land use category not specifically mentioned but meeting the intent of the district can be allowed. Therefore a solution can be allowed. Even if a consulting planner does not create the math for the Commission, by example, a 500 SF bathtub shaped rain garden contains the volume before releasing excess, and it stands to reason that a 500 SF increase is offset. I would encourage the planning commission to find that “compensatory, common sense solutions of rain gardens, regrading to slow pace of runoff, permeable pavers or open ground platforms, as presented at a 1:1 ratio form basis for the volume of increase in hard surface proposed is therefore mitigated and neutral to the City ordinance requirement and goal of no net increase in hard surface from the existing condition, and is therefore allowable under the code provisions to not increase the hard surface”; Your motion to approve would be a signal to provide meaningful and practical options for future residents as well by adding this issue as a work program task this year. There is no practical planning reason that pool equipment cannot be approved as proposed, adjacent to an existing property with pool equipment. Respectfully submitted, Donald Jensen, former PC member and Chair Land Use consultant and Landscape Architect 3004 Armour Terrace, St. Anthony, MN 55418 34