on any of the nights that you've witnessed this?
Mr. Orphanides, the issue is that I know, okay, the people that are-
Mr. Cameron, I'd ask you the director to answer my question.
Again, it-
Leonard, your witness has to answer the question.
This goes directly to the issue.
This goes directly to the issue.
No, it's-
Mr. Orphanides, okay.
I have no idea about the ongoing operation of the hotel.
That's something that only your client knows.
However, I do know that every night that the bar is open,
there are a number of people that are in the alleyway late at night,
some of which are intoxicated.
We smell marijuana at times.
there are significant amount of people that end up loitering for a period of time they go in
they go out they go in they go out now you ask i will i pose a question here this is not answering
my question this is not this is she doesn't get to go off like this you don't you don't ask the
questions yeah so mr bergman you're absolutely correct what i'm trying to demonstrate
no no she needs to go back to make a case if i might just interject the the mr orphanetes knows
the question the answer to the question she has not been inside the current bar restaurant so
therefore by definition she's not going to know the composition of the people inside whether
they're there or they're not i think i think what she gave it i do think what she answered and said
i don't know anything about the operations well for all for all i know she has an idea of other
people that are going inside so listen can we stipulate that she does not know whether or not
people inside the bar restaurant are guests of the hotel visiting guests of the hotel or
unrelated to the hotel at all okay yeah absolutely i just did that all right now now hold on david
Yeah, absolutely. I just did that. Now, hold on, David, we're done. I mean, we've got to end this
we're done i mean okay thank you
questioning. All right. Thank you. Can I ask one redirect question? I'm not done. I'm not done.
No, no. He's going to bring her back. He's going to bring her back the next time.
Okay. When we have. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. We will be in touch on when the
next hearing will be. Okay. Mr. Orfinis, could you stay around, take about a five-minute break
for the next hearing, okay?
Certainly, thank you.
All right, we'll take a five-minute break
and then we'll go into the next hearing.
Yeah, Len.
You're done with this case.
Thank you.
He might still be awake here.
All right, he should.
Hopefully, he'll be right back.
board member shaheed are you on i see two tanya sunkits
yes i'm here okay there we go thank you
Profenitis?
Profenitis?
I beg your pardon. Sorry.
That's fine. So number two, MI 2023-001-253-1330 East Burke Street. This is a reconsideration hearing. For the record, Mr. Orphan, as you've already been sworn, could you identify your client and relationship to this property?
certainly my client um excuse me mr chair this is hillary just i just want to interject quickly
and note that uh mr snell had to step away from this morning's hearing but we still have a quorum
thank you thank you proceed mr orphanetes uh yes my uh client is 1330 e berks e period berks b-e-r-k-s
comma llc okay they're under agreement to purchase the subject property okay and just for the record
We do have a letter of opposition from the RCO and also a letter of opposition from the council person.
We have all the required documents.
Mr. Orphanish, you can start.
If I can share my screen, I may share my screen.
Can you all see that?
We can.
Fantastic.
Let me just move this stuff over to the side.
I don't know how to get rid of this thing, but there we go.
All right.
So, real quickly, I'm just getting a little bit of a background, again, just to refresh your memory about this case.
So, we have three properties, 1326R, 1328, and 1330 East Berks.
This is the view from Berks Street.
This little gate here, down here to the left, is the strip of 1326R that's located behind the building with the green shingles on the front.
Actually, it's actually on the other side, but so we have a property behind the building with the green shingles and then the tan building, the garage is on 1330 and the door that looks more like the residential entrance is on 1328.
you can see here from the survey plan we have the three lots and as i indicated um and i didn't call
it out correctly in the photo but here we have 1330 1328 and then 1326 r uh it has this long
skinny strip that's two feet five inches wide that leads out to east berks that is its frontage
east or wilt street is not on the city plan it's an alley it's 15 feet wide these properties are
zoned RSA-5. Historically, these properties had a number of buildings in the front and the back.
You can see that back in 1917, there was a dwelling at the back of 1326R. There was a
dwelling at the back of 1328, also at the front, and then towards the front of 1330.
And this was a common condition for the properties that went through from Berks to East Wilk Street.
In fact, it's a common condition still for some of the properties that are still located.
that are still located the property um the adjacent property to the north and the next
The adjacent property to the north.
one next to that are owned by the same person and you can see here at 1334 and 1332 1334 still has
a dwelling in the back and then the dwelling in the front i believe that's rented in the back
and then um i think 1322 has still has a structure in the back they this big property up here which
called the Ice House. You can see in the aerials, also has units back along East Weld Street and
units up on East Burke Street. But you can see historically, this property had one, two, three,
one, two, four buildings located on it, four homes through the years up to 51. And then you can see
in 76, the rear buildings on 28 were, the rear building on 28 was removed sometime between 51
and 76, but there is still the dwelling at the back of 1326R. And that's as far as our records
go. There is now no building at the back on 1326R. Again, you just have the buildings that span 1328
and 1330 at the front. So historically, on these three parcels, there have always, there have been
four buildings, four dwelling units. We originally come to you with a plan to consolidate
these three lots into one lot. And part of the reason for that is that at one time,
we're not sure how utilities were arrived at for 1326R, but they more than likely came through
1328 or 1330. The two foot five inch wide strip is not wide enough to run utilities out to Burke
Street, and there are no utilities in the Wilk Street Alley. And as you can see from the survey,
if we were to even just want to develop 1326R with a single family dwelling like there had
been there historically, you're talking of a utility run that's over 300 feet to get back
to 1326R. It's cost prohibitive to develop it as an existing lot. Actually, to develop it with
another structure would generate a refusal by code because the building at 1326 and the building to
the other side at 1324 are both up to the front property line. We'd need to have our building
located all the way up at Burke Street, which obviously is impossible to do in a two-foot,
five inch wide strip. So we couldn't even develop this property by right. We'd need a variance and
financially we'd be unable to develop it because of the huge cost of running utilities 300 feet.
My client, who I will have speak in a little bit, because at our last hearing that we had
scheduled in this matter, following the granting of the request for reconsideration, we requested
a continuance at the suggestion or advice of Council President Clark and his office that my
client continue discussions with the immediate neighbors, which he has done. He's had extensive
meetings and conversations, and he can share some of those with you. But it's that disturbing
Wilt Street, which many of the people that have properties that front on Wilt use for ingress and
egress, vehicular ingress and egress, it would be disturbing to that. It would disturb their
ability to utilize that. So there's obviously concern on their part regarding running utilities
down Will Street, even if it were financially feasible to do. So because of the issue with 1326R,
it's not, and we have an appraisal report that was done that was submitted for our hearing back
in October that showed that essentially our plan, our original plan, which was to consolidate
the locks, create five single family dwellings with two-car off-street parking with a single
curb cut.
Right now, there is a curb cut on East Berks for that garage that you saw in the photos
I showed you initially.
So to get all the cars coming in and out onto Berks or a single curb cut, not using
Wilts Street at all, because we heard from some of the neighbors that they didn't want us to add
any traffic to East Wilts Street, that this seemed like a plan to kind of come up with
the use of the property, taking into account the issues with 1326R by consolidating the two
together. The appraisal report we submitted for our hearing back in October was that we needed
to five units, there was a financial hardship to do less than five units. Clearly, doing two
on lots of this size was not going to work if we were to consolidate 1326R into 1328,
and that we should demonstrate a financial hardship that we needed five. The zoning board
The zoning board had denied that variance request for the five units, even though we had revised the plan, we had relocated the plan, shifted it away from the neighbor to the north.
had denied that variant.
She had issues with us building, whether it was by right or by variance with a by right development project along her property line.
So we redesigned the project, flipped it around.
This is what we presented previously, and the zoning board granted no, even though we had shown that we had a financial hardship for five.
The economics, the economy has changed, the building economy has changed somewhat since that presentation.
We re-ran our numbers, and you can see at the appraisal report that I have at tab 11, a report of 126-23, that with those slight changes, and I can have the appraiser testify that we are now able to eke out four units, where before four units and clearly three, two, or one wasn't financially feasible.
Four is now possibly feasible, marginally feasible to do. So what we did is we went back to the community and what we presented was a plan with four, and you can see here, we reduced from five to four.
we kept the buildings away from the neighbor to the north and we added an additional off-street
parking space because some of the comments we received at the community group meeting were
and i get this all the time you provide one off-street parking space for each of the units
they say well you know they're not gonna it's not gonna be enough for everybody that lives there so
you provide two and then it's well where are their guests gonna park so now we have three
We did hear some people say, well, now there are too many cars.
I feel like I was a little bit stuck in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but we were just trying
to accommodate what the neighbors were speaking about.
We've had a number of meetings with the community.
We've bent over backwards.
We've heard them.
We understand what they're saying.
We've reduced the density.
Again, we now have the number of units that previously existed.
There were four homes on these three parcels previously, and now we're back to four, and we're keeping all the cars off street, including, I guess, unless they have three cars themselves, and we're only using the single curb cut that presently exists on these Berks.
One of the nice additional things about having this development this way, as opposed to some other options similar to what existed previously or that you have elsewhere on the block or across the street, is that having this access drive, and we did have testimony at the last proceeding regarding that, allows for emergency vehicles to get down, either down our drive or get hoses down our drive to access the
buildings and properties that back up to East Wilt Street from Montgomery Avenue, where they
clearly would not, we were told by the community, a fire truck would not be able to get down East
Wilt Street. So not only is this design allows for protection of our development, the properties
that are located East Wilt, as opposed to just fronting them on East Wilt, but it actually
provides additional benefit to those properties that back on the East Wilt at our end of the East
Will Street Alley. We did look at a number of different options at the beginning and throughout
this process. This layout is very similar to how other properties are laid out on the opposite
side of Berks. Again, historically, there were buildings at the front and back. This would be
if there was a building at the front and back of 1328 and 1330 and then trying to develop 1326R
somehow. Again, that is a problem. So this is one option. We looked at this scenario. And again,
with every scenario we looked at, by right, we ended up with more building, more, I guess,
lack of privacy for the property to the north of us than with our current design. Again,
And with our current design, what we have is we've pulled away from the property to the north.
You have a very wide drive aisle before you even get to our buildings.
The decks are further set back at the roof.
We do have a balcony at the second floor level, but it's pretty low.
But again, if you go to the design that we had here, and even going to this scenario,
where we developed, and again, the appraisal makes it clear that three just is a non-starter.
You end up with massive homes. You end up with a building built all along the property.
massive homes, you end up with a building built all along the property line of the neighbor to
the north and along the property lines of the property to the south of us. Massive buildings,
massive, you know, large, large homes, you know, 9,000, 8,000 square feet, 4,000 square feet in
the rear. I mean, it's just not even marketable at that size. And then you have a lot more cars
coming in and out of Wilt Street, which is not what the neighbors who, again, utilize Wilt Street
for parking and vehicular ingress and egress had wanted us to do. So again, and I can have
the gentleman who did the appraisal report speak to it real quickly, just to show how conditions
John Musnoff had changed from our first presentation to this presentation, just real
quickly, if you would, unless you want to accept, the board wants to accept the conclusions that he
stated in that report at their face value. We will accept it at face value. Accept it at face value?
Okay. Yes. But essentially, I mean, if you were to read it, you could see that he goes through
and he does talk about the change in economic conditions that have now made four, just barely.
So it is the minimum, the four, where five was the minimum variance required at that time of our last
proceeding because of the state of the building industry then things changed a little bit we were
like okay well has you know everybody's hearing that supply is easier is better um you know chain
of supply chain is better is improved the rates had changed that lightened up just a little bit
that made for the minimum variance and again that's the same number as used to as previously
existed there. So our change from the last, from what we last submitted is we went from five units
down to four. Again, we had previously submitted the flipping of the project to pull it away from
the property to the north of us. We actually have more open area now where before we had 37.9%
open area. We now have a whopping 44.7%. Mind you, only 25% is required. So with this design,
we have a ton of open area and we're getting actually two more cars off street with that
one fewer dwelling unit than what was originally proposed or proposed with the revised design.
Now, as I mentioned to you, after our last proceeding, when our proceeding was scheduled
in March, excuse me. We continued that proceeding so that my client can continue and engage in more
continued discussions with the near neighbors. And I would have Roland Cassis promoted to a
panelist because I'd just real quickly like to have him talk to you about the concerns of the
neighbors, which didn't necessarily have to do with the zoning issues that are here, but some
other issues unrelated to that. So if I could have Roland Cassis promoted to a panelist, I'd like