[MissoulaGov] Committee Update 1/7/09

[Bob Jaffe]

Greetings,

We had a relatively easy day back at committees after a couple of weeks
off. We spent about half the day doing interviews. This can get a little
tedious but this time I developed a little scoring sheet to help keep
track of the people since we were doing ten in one day. We interviewed
six of ten applicants for the open space advisory board and four of five
applicants to the planning board. We'll probably do the rest next week. 

We started with Public safety with the confirmation of four new police
officers and the purchase of six police car video cameras. The cameras
cost about $5000 each. They mount in the rear view mirror and record to
a flash memory device. It requires a supervisor with a key to remove the
memory from the device.  So when they come off shift the supervisor
removes the memory stick and puts it in a lock box. Someone assigned
from IT then takes it from the safe and uploads it to the server and
then makes the stick available for use again. The video is stored for a
minimum of 90 days until it is automatically erased unless it has been
flagged as something that needs to be saved. The officers do not have
access to delete video from the server any more.

 

In conservation we did the six OSAC interviews.

 

In PAZ we spent the first hour with a preliminary presentation of the
new Linda Vista Estates subdivision and the second hour doing planning
board interviews.  The LVE project was before us a number of months ago
but it had so many problems the developer withdrew the application.  The
project is a 200+ unit subdivision over the back side of the hill way up
miller creek.  The developer has about $500,000 committed to the
redevelopment of the intersection of lower and upper miller creek but it
is predicated on the entitlement to build another bunch of homes up
there. So when it started to look like the subdivision proposal was
going to fail it got the public works people a little concerned because
the road project had assumed the approval of the subdivision.

So they went back to the drawing board. Roger Millar called in an
outside planner to facilitate a mini design charrette between OPG staff
and the developer to draw up a subdivision that could be approved. This
got tweaked a bit and was presented to us today. There were only a few
issues needing to be addressed.

The big one is a provision in the Miller Creek Plan that says this area
cannot be developed until the rest of miller creek is built out to 80%.
Based on the way you calculate it the area can never be built out to 80%
of the planned density because the subdivisions were all built at lower
densities. The planning department has come up with a way to interpret
this to allow for this project but we will consider it on Monday night.
If we do go along with the interpretation then the lots can be entitled
now but the development will have to wait until the build out threshold
is met. This is estimated to be 8-10 years.

There is also an issue with some long block lengths we will need to work
out and a question about ten lots that face "green streets." These homes
are accessed through an alley and have a sort of big boulevard in the
front with no actual paved road for cars. Dick had some concerns on this
one. Who in their right mind would want to live in a house that couldn't
be approached on both sides by a vehicle? We are hoping to hear from
fire and ambulance people on Monday as to what they think of this. We
are also hoping to see other examples of where it has been used. There
is a remote chance we can actually hold the public hearing and resolve
these questions on Monday night to approve the subdivision. But it will
probably come back to committee.

 

After lunch we started with public works. We bought three BMW
motorcycles for the police department and discussed speed limits.  In
the ongoing saga of variations on the discussion of speed limits it came
out that speed limits were not supposed to be set anywhere in the city
without the approval of the city council. So staff did some research and
came up with all the places that speed limits had been set by the public
works department without council approval.  There were only about six
places. Almost all west of Reserve street.

The one that concerns me the most is George Elmer Drive. This is
essentially Greenfield development being built around a road that has
been set at 45 mph. My position is that the adjacent development pattern
is being shaped by the 45 mph design speed of the road. When we
considered the two Flynn ranch subdivisions there were aspects that were
predetermined and others strongly influenced by the nature of the road
design. Dick argued that the speed has no influence on the development
pattern but he is wrong. We didn't resolve anything and will be
revisiting this issue again. 

Something else I should note is that Steve King made an announcement
that they are anticipating some flooding conditions as all the snow
melts and we get some rain in the next day or two. They will be working
to keep storm drains clear of ice and doing their best to have crews
monitor the known problem areas. Marilyn pointed out that since they
don't even have storm drains in most of ward six there are already big
lakes all over the roads. Please drive carefully!

 

Thanks for your interest,

 

Bob Jaffe

Missoula City Council, Ward 3

bjaffe at ci.missoula.mt.us <mailto:bjaffe at ci.missoula.mt.us> 

406-728-1052

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