Ordinance 3768-20 - Laserfiche WebLink

Planning Commission and City Council to find that the land use designation should be changed. The original comprehensive plan and the subsequent rezones were appropriate at the time. However, we believe that the 2012 blanket rezone, in focusing on commercially zoned properties, missed an opportunity to examine this parcel. Redevelopment of the corridor has been stated as a goal since at least that rezone, if not before. The church's parking lots (which have a direct access off of Evergreen Way) represent an inefficient use of land along a transit-oriented corridor.In addition to this major change of vision in the corridor, additional redevelopment along the Evergreen Corridor is warranted, as evidenced by the success of the building two parcels north. Furthermore, with its large parking lot and direct access from Evergreen, the church resembles a higher intensity use much more than it resembles any single-family residential use. While there are critical areas that make redevelopment infeasible on the land across from here on Evergreen Way, the previously heavily engineered nature of the site makes that not applicable. Furthermore, any existing critical area is not proposed to be modified for this. In the case of the residential parcels directly to the south, the only access is from residential streets, any connection to Evergreen is infeasible from an engineering standpoint, and critical areas are present. Those aspects are not applicable to the subject site, which means that many of the reasons to keep the area single-family do not seem to be justified vis a vis the actual nature of the current use. In fact, those facts, coupled with the high-intensity nature of Evergreen Way, make a very good case that this parcel is particularly ill-suited to single-family development. Given other policies of the comprehensive plan, we believe that multiple family development would be a much more suitable use for this site. 4.Does the proposed land use designation promote a more desirable land use pattern for the community as a whole?If so, a detailed description of the qualities of the proposed land use designation that make the land use pattern for the community more desirable should be provided to enable the Planning Commission and City Council to find that the proposed land use designation is in the community's best interest. The proposed change to multifamily, R5 zoning represents a land use pattern that better reflects the city's vision for Evergreen Way as a mixed-use, transit focused corridor while not adding more land to commercial zones. R5 zoning would enable development that is better suited for uses that front a busy regional arterial road. As mentioned previously, the through-lot nature of the site alone would make for poor single family residential development. In addition, with Evergreen Way being a major arterial road, there are great amounts of noise and traffic that aren't present in several other places in the RI zone. The noise and heavy traffic are suited to multifamily and mixed uses, not single family residential use. In providing a further buffer between the established single-family uses and Evergreen, we believe that this rezone and redesignation to multifamily and R5 strikes a balance between the vision for the corridor, the redevelopment desires of fixture users, and the comprehensive plan's directive to not redesignate more land Commercial.