[MissoulaGov] committee update 7-8-09

[Bob Jaffe]

Greetings,
The morning started out well enough with a discussion on our new contract for towing abandoned vehicles. Pro Towing was awarded the bid for abandoned vehicles and Iron Horse got the bid for all other impound towing. The police were more comfortable with Iron Horse's indoor secure storage building for the impounds.

In Conservation things were looking even better with a change order for Pineview park that actually saved $16,000.  Patterson Enterprises has the contract. It was bid with a gazebo and porta-potty enclosure provided by the city. We were going to order them from somewhere. Patterson thought they could get them constructed locally for less. So we removed the items from the owners budget and moved it to the contractor's budget for a net savings of $16,000. Saves money and puts local firms to work. A good deal all around.

We also approved a bid to put fencing up along the new Tonkin trail in the south hills.  Jeff Stevens, neighborhood volunteer of the year, put the project together and volunteered to take out the existing fence himself to save some money. Marilyn thought she could help put together a crew to help Jeff with that project. If folks are interested they should get a hold of one of them. Part of the deal for the easement across the Tonkin property was the installation of a proper fence.
We also learned about the efforts to replace the footbridge up in the rattlesnake. It was taken out last year when the river looked like it was going to wash it away. Some of the logs upstream that were diverting the water to the main channel got washed away so more water was coming down the side channel and wrecked the footings.  To put in a proper diversion upstream and rebuild the footings will cost $13,000. The Friends of the Parks group is spearheading the fundraising. See their flyer: http://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentView.aspx?DID=1656

PAZ was nowhere near as pleasant. We took care of a few items and then got back into the zoning rewrite. We started to get into the scheduled discussion of height issues when John Hendrickson requested that we could stay with the small lot issue from last week a bit longer. He still had a few issues with the new R3 zone. Turns out this is the latest bugaboo that will bring about ruin and destruction to our single family zoned neighborhoods.  In fact, the R3 is nothing more than a backdoor PNC. The PNC, or planned neighborhood cluster, is the preferred tool of developers trying to build small lot homes. The PNC allows the developer the ability to adjust lot lines within the parcel and flexibility on setbacks between buildings within the parcel. All setbacks to the outside edges of the project must still comply with the underlying zoning.
The PNC has received much of the scorn of those who hate small lot development. The primary reason given is that it is not a rezone so the neighbors do not get a right to protest. I have heard that cry a hundred times that if only the neighbors had the right of protest then all would be fair and square. So in response to all this concern, the new zoning code no longer includes the option for a PNC. But in the interest of providing at least some tools for developers to build more affordable housing, the R3 zone was introduced. This is basically a zone that allows a 3000 foot minimum lot and a density of 1000 feet per unit. To mitigate fears that these could be shoehorned in on individual small lots the minimum size for one of these zones is 15000 feet.

What we learned today is that requiring those who wish to do small lot development to go through a rezone is not really enough. Now that they won that battle they are attacking affordable housing from a new front.  John's proposal was that the R3 zone could never be applied within an existing neighborhood.  Jon Wilkins also wanted to raise the minimum size of one of these zones to at least one full block. Lynn pointed out that the existence of this zone created uncertainty for the whole city since it could be applied anywhere at any time.
Never mind the fact that any zone can be applied anywhere at any time. There is nothing stopping a University Area home owner from coming down to OPG and requesting a rezone of their lot to Heavy Industrial. OPG would probably recommend denial, the neighbors would probably protest, and the rezone would require a super majority of council. But still, any zone could in theory be applied anywhere. Even if I didn't think we should allow people to build smaller homes I wouldn't be able to find any merit in that argument.
Regarding the issue of expanding the size of the zone to allow more people to protest, Jim Nugent pointed out that expanding the protest area away from the actual project can dilute the protest votes of the immediate neighbors. Besides, if you take a 15000 (100X150) foot parcel and add the 150 foot protest zone around it, you get an area of about four acres. That's almost as big as Bonner Park. Isn't that big enough?

John Hendrickson's motion to prevent this zoning to be applied in existing neighborhoods died on a five five vote. He may try this one again when he comes up with some definition for existing neighborhood. Jon Wilkins moved that we put aside further discussion on the R3. It was unclear exactly what he meant by this and Jon himself expressed disappointment in the other committee members for not coming up with "intelligent amendments" to his motion. The motion also failed five-five.
At this point I was pretty frustrated by what I saw as a completely frivolous discussion of no merit.  I said as much and this of course created even more poison in the room.

We did finally get to building heights. Turns out no one has any issues any more with the way maximum heights are calculated. There was some discussion regarding how we calculate them on a hillside. Laval did some calculations and had some graphics showing the upper and lower elevations of homes built on different slopes using the new calculations. It did not appear to be as restrictive as I had thought it would be. Ed had also raised some concern about that point but I believe was also satisfied. Pam had a remaining issue about the application of the standard in some of the parcels around town that have grades over 15% but are not on the south hills. We'll take that up next time, which will be 2:30-5:00 on Tuesday. We are going to try some extended meeting times to see if we are more productive that way.

I missed A&F but got back in time for Public Works. We approved the agreements to use stimulus money for the north Higgins and the rattlesnake gateway projects. Even though these qualify as shovel ready, no shovels will hit the dirt on these projects until next spring. In the context of the government, that is a fast track project.

In BCOW we haggled over the merits of approving the budget now and making amendments later, or waiting and approving it later with fewer amendments. Brent argued that if we approve it now their office can get started on all sorts of stuff and we can make the adjustments in payroll.  John Hendrickson said he could only support this if Bruce Bender could state on the record that he was 100% positive of favorable outcomes in the union discussions. Of course, he couldn't do this because in the real world things are not black and white and there is no such thing as 100% certainty, especially when you are asking an engineer about union negotiations. But eventually we did get enough votes to set the public hearing on the final budget for later in August.

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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