Thank you. We're happy to answer any questions.
questions from the board no chair thank you questions or comments from the virtual audience
i do not see any answer mr chair planning commission thank you chair bergman and good
afternoon david effecto with the city planning commission mr chairman and board members in 2017
this block was rezoned to commercial mixed use five at the property owner's request the appellant
has not shown that an economic detriment would accrue if they were required to follow the
dimensional requirement for signs in the zoning code. The City Planning Commission recommends
that the board deny the proposed dimensional variance. Thank you. MI 2023-003-253-3025
John F. Kennedy Boulevard. I vote yes with proviso. Revised plans, four pages,
stamped by ZBA August 30th, 2023? Mr. Chairman, it's actually five pages.
Oh, Hillary, do we have that? Yeah. Meredith, the first page of the four-page set was just
a cover sheet. There were no plans. Okay. You're right. Thank you. No problem. You're right.
So, revised plans, four pages, stamped by ZBA August 30th, 2023. Thomas Holloman,
my vote is yes with proviso james snell my vote is yes with proviso
ishmael shaheed my vote is yes with proviso thank you counsel thank you number six mi 2023
002 367 7719 caster avenue bernanastasio is the attorney
recommendation support from the ronhurst civic association no explanation given
hi mr anastasio could you state your name please and spell for the court stenographer
hi mr chair burn anastasio a-n-a-s-t-a-s-i-o 2016 spruce street philadelphia do you swear or
affirm to tell the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth i do could you identify your client
the relationship to the property. Sure. I represent Mr. Danny Chee, who is the owner applicant.
Okay. And our vice chair has just a few questions. Thank you.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal and stipulate towards
accuracy? I do. Have you emailed in all the required documents and exhibits that are needed
and required to proceed with this case five days in advance of this hearing? Yes, sir.
Thank you, counsel. Please proceed.
Thank you. 7719 Castro Avenue.
Mr. Chair, this is pretty straightforward.
This is a first floor addition for the change of occupancy at the second level only for office use.
for office use no change of occupancy on the first floor level and retail and location was
No change of occupancy on the first floor level.
shown on the plan basically we are here for pre-existing commercial use on the first floor
we'd like to bring it upstairs a little bit the addition does provide some minimum side yard and
maximum occupied area of variances to be overcome.
But as you'll see, once I zoom out,
I'm working with a new format of Adobe.
So if you'll just excuse me for a moment.
uh these are this is the property in question we have the addition uh going in the rear and
the second floor and then
we have the plans for the existing retail space there'll be some um in the rear extension there'll
be additional retail space. And then upstairs will be offices and storage and nothing else
but that. Obviously, because it's zoned CMX2, the second floor is supposed to be residential.
However, based on our presentation to the local immediate neighbors, they prefer to have the commercial space expand to the second floor.
Obviously, the operations are during the weekday and won't detrimentally impact the neighbors' need for additional parking.
And, of course, there will be no evening activity that might preclude existing residents from having to find parking.
The history of the property shows that this has always been a retail commercial space at the property, and we are just looking to expand that.
I submitted the history of the property in our exhibits, as well as some photos.
showing uh the second floor being uh storage currently and that's primarily what we'd have
in addition to some offices we did meet with the uh registered community organization
which is here in a public meeting on the 29th of june and we have proof of posting
78 individual households were mailed. It was well attended. And as you noted, and I submitted
in a separate email to the board attorney and the executive director, there was support, in fact,
for the, from the Ron Hurst Civic Association. There was no one who voted in opposition.
And no one even voted in non-opposition.
Each and every one of them want to support this business.
It's a business that's been in the community for quite some time.
They'd like them to stay there, considering how so many commercial spaces are either closing or moving on to larger units.
And as a result, we respectfully request the granting of the variants.
With that, I'd like to call Mr. Danny Chee to raise his virtual hand.
They've been allowed to speak.
Hi, Mr. Chee, could you state your name, please?
And speak for the court stenographer.
Yes, the attorney called me Danny Chee, which is my English name.
My legal name is Z-Qiang Chee, which is Z-H-I-Q-I-A-N-G, last name C-H-I.
do you swear or affirm to tell the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth
yes proceed counsel thank you mr chair mr chi did you hear my presentation
to the board this afternoon good and you adopted as your own testimony
yes and it's true and accurate to the best of your knowledge yes
yes thank you mr chair questions from the board no no chair no chair
Questions or comments from the virtual audience?
planning commission thank you mr chairman and good afternoon david effecto city planning
Planting commission.
commission chair and board members in 2022 the zoning map was changed on this commercial corridor
from commercial mixed use two to commercial mixed use one at the request of the council office
with bill number 220776 the city planning commission recommended against bill number
220-776 at its October 20, 2022 meeting. The proposed use and dimensional variances would
not have been generated if the previous zoning had remained. The City Planning Commission
recommends the board grant the proposed use and dimensional variances. Thank you. MI 2023-002-367-7719
Castor Avenue. I vote yes.
Thomas
Holloman, my vote is yes.
James Hill, my vote is yes.
Ishmael Shaheed, my vote
is yes. Thank you all.
Thank you, counsel. Number seven,
MI 2023-002-197,
1342 East Palmer Street.
Richard DeMarco is the
attorney.
Letter of opposition from Fishtown
Neighbors Association.
Mr. DeMarco.
Sorry, good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the board.
Hi, could you state your name, please, and spell for the court stenographer?
Yes, sir.
My name is Richard DeMarco, last name spelled D-E-M-A-R-C-O.
Do you swear for him to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?
Could you identify your client, the relationship to this property?
Yes, the client is Valix Property Group. Mr. Joe Jaquinto is in the Zoom to testify on behalf of the entity.
Our vice chair has a few questions.
Sure, sure.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal and stipulate to his accuracy?
Yes, I do.
Have you emailed in all the required documents and exhibits that are needed and required to proceed with this case five days in advance of this hearing?
Yes, we did supplement, though, on Monday with some additional tax information and some photos.
Please proceed and share your screen.
Thank you.
So let me cover, if I may, Mr. Chairman, the tax clearance issue first.
Bear with me here.
Hold on a second.
I froze for a minute.
Bear with me.
All right, here we go.
So, Mr. Chairman, the tax clearance came back negative. There were, and members of the board, there is an old lien that was paid at closing but showed up to deny the tax clearance.
I submitted on Monday a bunch of information regarding that.
What I have here, which was submitted on Monday, is the HUD-1 settlement sheet, which shows payment of liens when the property was purchased by VALEX.
You can see here the beginning of that.
And you can see an $80 payment.
Hopefully you can see.
By the way, can you see my screen okay?
We can.
We're fine.
So this $80,000 was the payment of liens according to an agreement with the city.
And these liens are still showing up.
as attached to the property. So the city has not corrected that, but they are paid.
This is the proof of that. There's an agreement here that was signed by the buyer when the property
was purchased. And all of the lien numbers actually match those liens. And also there was
a real estate tax bill that was paid. That is also in my exhibits as well. We asked the board
to hear the case. If the board wants further clarification, we're happy to provide it later.
I think that we have provided enough to show that these issues were addressed, but we're happy to
continue to work on it to get something from the city. We've been on the phone every day since then
to try to get you something more. But these documents really do show that these documents
were paid. So we'd ask you to hear the case. And then obviously the board wants to hear the vote.
That's fine as well. And we'll continue to work on it. Okay, proceed. All right. So I want to start
with some photographs. We're here for a request to allow a front access garage on 1342 Palmer
Street, East Palmer Street. We had actually a drone take photos. I want to start with the
photos if it's okay. This is our property here. The property has been constructed without the
garage, but as you'll see when I go through the photos, there's an opening that has been
uh preserved uh depending on what the outcome of this case is it can either be uh constructed as
preserved. Depending on what the outcome of this case is, it can either be
a single family home without a garage or with it if we're successful uh with this case um this is
the property this is the school uh that the community was concerned about which resulted in
in some of the opposition in our case i want to point out that there's a curb cut to a parking lot
only a few doors down to the school and so there is and there's other curb cuts that I'll show you
in a second but this is as you can see a parking lot with multiple cars and a curb cut that is
already present not so far away. This is our property here note that we cannot utilize rear
access parking, even if we wanted to. Obviously, the developer would like to be able to not have
to seek a variance for dedicated parking, but we are unable to get rear access. So the property
prevents us from doing that. And as you'll hear from me and my witness, a lot of the buyers are
now wanting dedicated parking, and a lot of the buyers are also coming with electric cars.
Electric cars cannot be charged on the street.
And you'll hear Joe Giacquinto mentioned that almost 80 to 90 percent of the new buyers are coming with electric cars.
So even if we are the point I'm making, Mr. Chairman, that even if we are denied and the property comes with a buyer that has a car, which is very likely, if it's electric, he will not be able to charge it without running a line across the street to where the parking exists.
I forgot to mention there is no parking on our side of the street.
We would not be displacing any parking by having the front loaded garage.
You see here, I'm indicating a small, very small street called Willing Street.
There's already parking that, and of course there's no parking along the street,
but you can see the volume of the problem in the neighborhood.
There's an extreme parking problem in the neighborhood.
we want to not create a greater problem. We want to add off-street parking without displacing any
on-street parking, which is what we're proposing. You can see an existing curb cut here with
multiple cars. That is across the street. At the top of the page, I'll show you better photographs
here. Almost across the street, there's another curb cut that already exists on the other side
of the street. There are multiple curb cuts that already exist, Mr. Chairman. This is Willing Street.
This is our property here. As you can see, there's our zoning poster there. As you can see, the
opening is just being preserved here for the outcome in this case. If we're successful, we
would include the garage. If not, we would just have the wall there and a window. This is a pocket
park here, for lack of a better term, or community garden. And as you can see, we don't control it,
so we cannot provide access, rear access parking. This is Willing Street that shows cars parked
illegally along the sidewalk, on the sidewalk, and next to the sidewalk. This is right around
the corner from us. This is the curb cut across the street with the garage opening.
As you can see, on the other side of the street, we have parking, but our side of the street, which is right here, there is no parking.
You can see our property right here, Mr. Chairman.
Just two properties over is a depressed curb with a driveway that is unpaved that serves a large property in the rear here.
but this is accessed with by cars and there are cars that park within this back area here
so there are multiple curb cuts already on the block across the street and along our side
and this is another view of the already existing curb cut two doors over with cars parked within
that that area this is Willing Street as I showed you earlier this is the school
uh which which has a large parking lot here which is a couple of doors down from us
this is another curb cut on the next block uh the um 1400 block of palmer street which is
across from the cemetery well let me go to the let me let me go through the exhibits very briefly
And then I'll call Mr. Chiquinto. This is the refusal. It's a single refusal for the curb cut.
By the way, Mr. Chairman, we actually received approval for the garage over the counter.
for the garage over the counter. And I'm not looking for a medal or anything, but I wanted
And I'm not looking.
to let you know, we told the examiner that he had made an error because we didn't want to have,
you know, there was a practical reason for that. We didn't want to have to come back
to bite us. But I did want to mention that we were forthcoming on this and we sought the
community's approval. We sought this board's approval. Even though we received a permit
in error, we did notify the department that that was a mistake.
All right, let me show the site plan. Then we'll get to Mr. Jaquinto.
Bear with me here. My computer runs a little. Oh, this is another view of the front of the property, as you can see.
And also, this will be obviously paved new, the sidewalk in front of our building, depending on the outcome of this case, either way, obviously.
another view here and again we did receive the proper permits for the home without the garage
but we're waiting to complete the front depending on the outcome of this case
this is the curb cut almost directly across the street
we rotate this
went the wrong way sorry