[MissoulaGov] Committee Update 8-5-09

[Bob Jaffe]

Greetings,
We had a smaller crowd than usual with Dick, Lyn, Stacy, and Dave all absent. Things went pretty smooth with the rabble-rousers all on vacation.
We started out in Conservation doing interviews. First we had Tim Hall applying for reappointment to the conservation district board. He has been doing it forever and answered each of the interview questions with an educational mini-presentation.  It was one of the more informative board interviews I can remember.  He was also unopposed for the seat so we voted him in for another term.
We also did a couple of interviews for the Greenhouse Gas & Energy Conservation Team. There are six applicants for three spots. We will continue those next week.

In PAZ we returned to the sign ordinance portion of the zoning code.  We picked up with a motion on the floor from last week to ban all future installations and apply the standards that came out of the sign working group before being amended by the planning board.  After much discussion we voted on those as two parts and both motions failed. That was all offered up as a substitute motion to the idea that would limit the things to just displaying static messages that change every eight seconds. So we returned to that motion and it eventually failed.  We had a room full of folks there again primarily from the sign industry.  They are all a very participatory bunch and it seemed like everyone wanted to speak at every call for public comment.
Our only real heated moment of the day came when I announced that we had heard enough public comment and were going to move on. Wilkins and Hendrickson came out of their seats with points of order about the folks who had taken time out of their schedules to come down and I had to let them talk.
My take on it was that we were now into the fourth hour of discussing a motion that after the first five minutes was obvious it didn't have the votes to pass. Committee meetings are not like our Monday night public hearings. We can't just go into the wee hours of the morning if there are a lot of folks who want to speak. We have a fixed amount of time for the meeting.  I would guess that all those people who were taking time off of work to be there two weeks in a row would prefer that we finish the job so they don't have to come again next week. I agreed to hear more comment but pleaded with folks to keep it brief and only come up if they had something new to offer that had not been said. This seemed to work as comment through the rest of the meeting was more metered and focused. We are pretty seasoned at sitting through these long meetings. I'm guessing folks in the audience had to be ready to see some progress.
So then we moved on to some of the easier to tackle pieces.  We had a motion to ban any animation or movement effects. Screens would have a one second minimum hold time and a one second maximum transition time. This passed. This gets rid of what I think is the most annoying aspect of these things but is still very permissive.
We then got rid of the restriction on hours of operation as this created a lot of problems with definitions and enforcement.  Dark skies issues could be addressed in other ways.
John Hendrickson made a motion to lift the restrictions on new dynamic signs in the central business district (downtown).  This failed.
And that was about it for signs.  I would have liked to have seen something a little more restrictive but in my opinion the motions we had to work with were not really holding up to the scrutiny of the sign folks who were arguing against them.  A lot of the arguments were pure bunk but there were also a lot of legitimate concerns about how the smaller and less obtrusive versions of these things could function under the proposed restrictions. We needed something a bit more fine tuned.

We then took up the issue of administrative adjustments. There has been this assertion from the folks who are trying to kill this zoning rewrite process that a new position has been created. The dreaded Zoning Czar as they call it. The code refers to the position as the Zoning Officer. And of course there has always been a zoning officer with the authority to interpret the zoning code. This has been one of the jobs of our director of the office of planning and grants. The responsibilities and authority of the zoning officer is defined in our current title 19 and is only clarified and slightly expanded in the new title 20.   Jon Wilkins had a problem with two of these areas. The first was the ability to grant zoning compliance for a home where the lot size was short by up to five percent as long as that was the only area of non-compliance.  This could only be applied to lots that were in existence prior to the date the code is approved. The process would include notification of everyone within 150 feet and a posting on the property and a 20 day waiting period.  There would also be a right of appeal to the BOA if anyone objected to the zoning officer's decision. Jon's motion to eliminate this adjustment authority failed.
The other problem area was the authority to reduce the required parking for a residential or commercial development by up to 15% if it was within 500 feet of a bus stop that is served every thirty minutes.  We ran out of time before this one got voted on so that is where we will pick up next time.

Then in Public Works we learned that the big concrete sewer pipe that brings all the poop from wards five and six across the river was seriously deteriorated. It is some kind of junction between a few different lines so there is a lot of turbulence of gasses eating away at the concrete. The video inspections show it all corroded and the rebar exposed. When the river came up this year the pipe was being infiltrated by a couple of million gallons of water per day. This represented almost 20% of the effluent being processed by the plant during that period. I asked what seemed like the obvious question. If all that water was coming in to the pipe from the ground water, wasn't there a lot of poop coming out of the pipe into the water?  The answer was no, not very much.  The stuff in the pipe is running along the bottom foot or two. It is the top part of the pipe that is exposed to the gasses that is corroded. The river of sewage running down the pipe also doesn't have much outward pressure. When the water comes up and submerges the whole pipe by a few feet, there is a lot of pressure along the top damaged part for the water to get in. So it is OK but needs to be fixed this year. We approved about $35,000 for the engineering.
We approved some contracts for some new stimulus money to replace a bunch of playground equipment, install lots of handicap ramps in sidewalks, and replace the bridge on Rattlesnake creek. The fund raising efforts to replace the bridge were going pretty slow so the administration picked that project to get the money. There were some objections at first to moving the Rattlesnake project up to the top of the priority list but there was plenty of love being spread to parks all over town so it was OK.

Last item of the day was to confirm our plans for the election with the county clerk. We are going to issue mail in ballots 15 days in advance. We are going to have the same five drop points for ballots as last time plus we are adding Lowell school to the list.  You can't actually vote there, you can just bring in your ballot. There will also be automark machines at these locations to assist blind people to vote. People can also drop their ballots off at the courthouse 24/7 after they are issued.

We also learned that the commissioners are planning to move election day voter registration to the fair grounds. They think there is not enough room at the court house so they want to set up an election center. I hate this idea.  I really think this is the sort of thing that should be done at the county seat. If they have to move it, it should at least be downtown so folks who show up to vote don't have transportation issues. Maybe they could use the council chambers? I'm not sure how much room they really need.

Thanks for your interest,

Bob Jaffe
Missoula City Council, Ward 3
1225 South 2nd West
Missoula, MT 59801
(406) 728-1052

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