I'm going to hold it for two weeks in an effort to get a letter from the RCO.
Do you want to give your opinion now or do you want to wait?
Yeah, I think I will.
Ryan Bednar, City Planning.
Property is indicated for single-family residential use on the city plan.
Our adopted district plan recommends no change in existing zoning and dislocation.
Applicant's hardship is not supported with evidence of unique physical circumstances
or condition of the property that would prevent it from being used conformity with the code
proposal represents a significant overuse. Therefore, we recommend the request of variance
not be granted. So, Mr. Harris, we're going to hold the vote on this. I understand. The record
will be closed other than hearing from the RCO and having you give you a chance to respond to
what the RCO says. Hillary, how about two weeks for this at 2 p.m.? That's fine,
Mr. Chair, that would be June 12th. June 12th, and we'll vote on this at 2 p.m., Mr. Harris.
Thank you. Thank you. Okay, number eight.
MI 2024, 00079811 Scherz Lane. Ryan Bolin is the attorney for the buyer. There is two letters of
opposition from the Mania Neighborhood Council. There is a letter of support from Council Member
Jones. The applicant also provided four letters of support from Manny Young Development Corporation,
Manny Young Special Service District, three near neighbors, and six area businesses. Also,
there's a petition signed by 58 neighbors. Mr. Boland, could you please state your name as
spelled for the court stenographer? Yes, Ryan Boland, R-Y-A-N, B as in boy, O-L-A-N-D.
Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Could you identify your client and their relationship to the property?
Andrew Langsom. He is the equitable owner of the property subject to an agreement of sale.
Our vice chair has just a few questions, sir.
Good afternoon, counsel. Do you agree to waive the reading of the refusal or stipulate to his accuracy?
Yes, I do.
Have you emailed in all the required documents and exhibits that is needed to proceed with this case five days in advance of this hearing?
Yes, I did.
Thank you, counsel. Please proceed and share your screen.
Mr. Bolland, just for a point of information, you were here once before with this.
As you go through this, could you point out for the board the changes that have been made since last time?
Yes, we'll do.
That includes, you know, letters against, letters for, changes in numbers of parking spaces, etc.
Yes, of course.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to give you a brief summary, and then I'll take you to the presentation.
So we are here today on a variance for one refusal, which is that multifamily dwellings are not permitted in the ICMX zoning district.
This is a mixed-use project, which has 944 square feet of ground-fork commercial with 42 residential units.
And then we also have 37 parking spaces on the ground floor, a small loading zone just inside the garage, and this is a 38-foot-tall building.
We're seeking a variance here due to the unique physical and topographical conditions that create a hardship to have any as-of-right use.
And I think the board will understand this once I walk them through the photographs.
There's also an economic hardship here as it would cost more to build.
There's also an economic hardship here, as it would cost more to build and as of right use, such as office, than it would rent for.
Schur's Lane here is a 26-foot wide road, and you're seeing a rendering here, and there's no parking on our side of Schur's Lane.
There's only parking on the opposite side of the road.
And due to the narrow road, it is impossible to have large trucks access this site, as would be required for ICMX.
This property happens to be pretty narrow for an ICMX property.
It is 76 feet wide and 231 feet deep.
As you'll be able to see through the photographs, this is surrounded by, there's the towering septa tracks on the uphill side of the property.
and then the Little Woods property, there's tall walls that I'll show you on this downhill side as
well as the rear side. And this is also located off of the desirable Main Street, and it happens
to be on either bedrock or solid rock that's just under the surface, which makes underground
parking not economically feasible. The current use looking at the aerial images happens to be
a parking lot, but it's an illegal parking lot. The owner has not gotten a special exception that
would be required. And in any event, he only brings in $1,500 a month, which wouldn't even
cover a mortgage payment and taxes on this property. I'm going to be presenting the testimony
of the listing agent, Senior Vice President at Biswanger, Chris Pennington, who already submitted
a letter that was included in our presentation. And Mr. Pennington is going to testify about an
exhaustive nine-month search for an as-of-right tenant, which was something that both he and the
seller wanted because they didn't want this dragged out process. And he will also be here
to rebut the bold statements from the RCO stating that there is an unspecified as-of-right user.
And they will also rebut some statements that were made in a letter we got at about 3 a.m. today
from the RCO as well. Finally, Chris is going to testify that the reason he didn't get any
interest over this nine-month period when he marketed the property is because the economics
didn't work. No one was going to buy the property and be able to construct an all-new building for
a as-of-right use. The money wasn't there. It didn't make sense. The code requirements for
a hardship are met. And it's important to note the hardship here isn't one specific to, it's not
one just generally for Maniunk or generally for the city, this or one for ICMX. This is related
to the unique physical conditions of this property. And what we're seeking here is instead of having
100% commercial or industrial, we're going to be engaging the street level. And I'll show you here
with my cursor there's going to be 944 square feet of commercial here on the ground floor
we're going to have that with three stories of residential units above and this this commercial
space was added after seeking input from the community late last year and as Mr. Chairman
already said we have the support from Councilman Curtis Jones we have the support of our only
immediate neighbor who are the Littlewoods who own the property that's an L that surrounds the
property. We have the support from Manionk's business development organization, which is the
Manionk Development Corporation. It's 21 member board voted to approve signing a letter of support.
And that board has three members from seven different parts of the business community.
There's the community at large, business at large, wellness and specialty, retail, restaurant, professional office industrial, as well as commercial office owners.
We also received the letter of support from the Manion Special Services District, whose board also voted to sign the letter of support.
we'll also walk you through the individual letters of support from a bunch of other
nearby business owners and also show you our petition that was signed by approximately 58
members of the maniunk community so going back to mr chairman's question there was a hearing back
in september of 2023 where the applicant sought a variance for 45 residential units and important
here's the difference here there wasn't any commercial we downscaled from 45 to 42
to. We were criticized at our RCO meeting there because there wasn't, they said there wasn't
sufficient evidence as to that we had tried hard enough to find anyone. We ended up bringing our
listing agent, Chris Pennington, to the zoning board hearing, but it was a little bit, you know,
too little too late. And we got, so we ended up getting a letter of opposition from the RCO the
week of that hearing. And again, we thought we had addressed that issue by bringing Mr. Pennington on.
And, again, we thought we had addressed that issue by bringing Mr. Pennington on to explain the nine months of efforts and why he thought that his efforts wouldn't result in finding a tenant.
We also did not have a letter of support from the councilman at the last CBA hearing.
We didn't even have a single letter of support from anyone.
We didn't go out and get any letters from anyone.
So that's another major difference here.
So in January of 2024, we submitted this new zoning application after my client went out, spoke with members of the community, and we subsequently had a meeting with the executive board of the RCO Maniunk Neighborhood Council.
And we made more changes to the plans to to change the way the entrance was internally.
We added this truck parking inside and we addressed a number of other concerns about measurements and other design issues.
so after the RCO meeting we ended up getting a letter of opposition back in April that listed
that there were 16 non-near neighbors that were that were members of the RCO and two other non-near
neighbors who voted in opposition and I think there were two that actually stayed on the vote
in favor but this opposition we will show you that this opposition it doesn't represent the
community here, the immediate neighbors. This opposition was for non-near neighbors. All of
our neighbors here are commercial. And we've gone out and we've gotten the letters of support
from our immediate neighbors. And we will also be presenting evidence here today from our design
team, our engineer, our architect, our listing agent, the developer, as well as these letters
of overwhelming support.
So I'm going to just take the board briefly
through the table of contents of the documents
I'm going to walk everyone through today.
Mr. Bolin, I have a question.
How long do you think this is going to take?
I'm hoping a half hour total with our,
because we have three witnesses.
You have three witnesses too?
We have three witnesses.
I understand a member of the community
that wanted to testify has a hard stop at 345 all right all right come on please okay please
proceed then okay um the the first item i'm going to walk you through are the 3d renderings i already
showed you one page of those i'll also take you through the refusal and then most importantly
all the photographs and the aerial images i'll take you through the rco one and one of you
one of you start one of you starting start right from the top okay so here's the 3d rendering um
that everyone has already seen here. So pretty simple. We have the garage opening, a ramp coming
in. You can see there's a significant hill here. You can see how high the, and there's some better
images our design professionals will take you through, but you can see we have the railroad
tracks right here that make this just a tricky site. Let me show you another image that just
gives you a little bit more perspective so this is zoomed out and as you'll see where my cursor
is in the bottom left that is main street there that's main street um along there and and we're
this big building that that that is right here the four-story building and our neighbor the
little woods is this l-shaped building um in front of us then we have the refusal which again
is only because of the multifamily use. And then most importantly, I'm going to walk you through
these photographs. So just to orient everyone here, right here where my cursor is, is Main Street,
and we're on Schur's Lane. And the septa tracks are just behind us, and our property here is
in purple. It's actually a complete rectangle. The next image here is just zoomed up a little
bit more here. You can see this is the illegal parking I had referenced before. And this property
historically, there's a railroad spur that went across here and it was used, they dumped coal
here. Coal storage and then later on building storage supplies. And there's a dilapidated
building here in the front that needs to go. Here's just another perspective of it. You can
see here um on the top of the screen we have the very kind of imposing walls here of the septo
railroad tracks the next image this is just same thing it just zoomed in a little bit just to
understand and and all of these um support posts will be eliminated um which the railroad tracks
were on. Here's just another image where you can see the Littlewood. This is the Littlewood
Dye Works factory behind us. So you can see if you follow my cursor, there's some very
dye works factory behind us so you can see if you follow my cursor there's some very
tall imposing walls along the side and then the rear and there's also some tanks here
next photo again this is the dilapidated building in the front
here's just a shot of the entryway it's a very narrow driveway and we have this old facade here
again this is just looking straight down the driveway just to give you a little bit of
perspective here's another close-up of the dilapidated building letting you you see
exactly where the railroad tracks are and I have a couple more images here this is looking up
Schur's Lane from Main Street that gives you a little bit of a perspective as to the hill
another image and as you can see here there's no parking on our side of the street there is on the
other side next image again just just showing you the the imposing railroad tracks the hill
here's an image that is taken um from the top of our property looking down to main street down to
the Schuylkill down below, just to understand this is a steep hill where you don't want
trucks parking. And in fact, you know, there's nowhere to have a truck stop on this side of the
road because there's nowhere for a loading zone. Here's some more images. Here's just another image
looking straight back from the entrance letting you understand what the little wood looks like
another one looking straight back you can see the large towers i think we're seeing this
pretty well i mean okay um yep we've got we've got the
Yeah, the power lines. Right. Imposing over this.
So we received a letter of opposition from the RCO back in approximately September in the fall when we first came to the board.
And again, this the letter is here. We had about the same number of votes.
and the letter in essence said that they that we hadn't established at the RCO meeting any evidence
as to the efforts and in fact we really hadn't presented our listing agent we subsequently did
that before the board the next exhibit here is the letter of opposition for this here
and in this letter of opposition again we have a similar vote we have a few attendees here that
voted in favor of us. And in this letter, the RCO complains that they believe, again,
that this property should be developed as commercial. They don't say why. They don't
say what it should be. They don't present any evidence. And they also complain that
950 square feet of commercial just wasn't enough to address their concerns.
so now i'm going to call my first witness um dennis dennis if you can raise your hand please
dennis has the spot to speak dennis works for the real estate office is that
i'm sorry dennis is um he's with um ruggiero plant um the the engineers okay thank you sir
could you please state your name and spell for the stenographer sure it's dennis kurek d-e-n-n-i-s
k-u-r-e-k and i'm with regiro plant land design right sure do you swear or affirm to tell the
truth the whole truth nothing but the truth i do please proceed counsel and and dennis i think you
already did so but can you explain what your connection is to this project and your training
and experience we're this we're the civil engineers for the project got it what can you
tell me about how this site location limits the ability to have commercial and industrial uses?
Well, for access for larger delivery trucks or access for delivery trucks for your larger
commercial or industrial use, with Schur's Lane being a fairly narrow 26-foot wide cartway
And the lot itself being a very narrow 76 and change width, you would not be able to maneuver or get any large delivery vehicles onto the site that you would need for any type of larger industrial or commercial space.
And you agree that there's also no parking on this side of Schur's Lane that we could utilize in the street?
Correct. The parking that's provided on Schur's is on the opposite side of the street. There's no parking in front of our property.
Correct. The parking that's provided on Schur's is on the opposite side of the street.
There's no park.
And in Schur's Lane, is this a steep hill where the property is located?
Yes, it's a steep incline up from Main Street.
Okay. So is it fair to say that the unique qualities of this property make it not suitable for the commercial and industrial uses that require trucks?
Yes. We would not be able to have any trucks maneuver on the site. So then you're talking about the only availability would be having trucks either shut down Schur's Lane for loading or pull on, head on and back out, which would not be a good safety issue that would arise from that.
and the rco had said it's at at some point in one of their letters they had complained why don't you
just tear down this old facade and and then you won't have an issue with parking um with access
with trucks if you tore down the existing building and facade and didn't save it is that going to
alleviate the issues with truck access to the site no the issue is the width of the property
The 76 feet wide, your smaller delivery trucks that any type of sizable commercial element would need are WB-30 and that would not, you wouldn't have the space to maneuver.
Terrific. Thank you, Dennis. If Chris Pennington can raise his hand. He's the commercial real estate broker.
Yeah, sure. He testified last time, right?