And this is the ordinance changing the south side of the 2,000 block of Washington.
I'm just scrolling through that real quickly not to hold you up.
But it shows, and again, the Planning Commission will be able to speak to this about the change that's happening on Washington Avenue, I think, that we're all seeing evidence of.
And so here is a 2035 plan.
This is our property right here.
And it shows in the 2035 plan, it shows 2101 for industrial residential mixed use.
It shows 2201, which has already been granted a variance for residential use as ICMX, similar
to what ours is.
The pink is ICMX.
And then further to the west is ICMX.
Down here at 25th and south on the northwest corner, it's already been developed as a mixed
commercial development project.
So you have this in the 2035 plan, but I believe the planning commission will speak to that why this received ICMX versus IRMX and regarding their position as we understand it based upon our meetings with them regarding the proposed industrial residential proposed use here.
So that sets the table for the, for the, where the property is, what its current situation is, and what the, in terms of zoning and surrounding developments that seem to be in conformance with the 2035 plan or the Planning Commission's position regarding deviations there from.
um at tab here you have at tab six you have our application so there is an existing uh
industrial use it is a is a use that is run by the owners of the property so they use their own
property um it's used for uh marble granite countertop kitchen showrooms a showroom and
showrooms, a showroom and manufacturing, some light manufacturing and fabrication there,
manufacturing, some light manufacturing.
storage of materials and the like. The original application was to, those two stories occupy
100% of the lot. The original application was to add five stories on top of the existing two stories
for use in that five-story addition as 37 residential dwelling units. There were to be
15 accessory parking spaces accessed from, and as you can see here at tab seven, the original plan
had parking coming in from Washington Avenue through one of the existing curb cuts.
One of the other existing curb cut is right here that is to be filled to allow for an additional
on-street parking space, but it was one way to access the 15 off-street parking spaces
and then exiting on the Kimball Street.
Kimball Street is one-way headed west.
And here's the zoning drawing showing the five-story addition,
a pilot house on top of the seven-floor roof.
That would be a total seven floors.
A deck at the back of the, on top of the existing two-story portion with the pilot house,
a deck at the third floor, balconies throughout on either side.
deck at the front of the sixth floor with the balcony at the front of the
seventh, the front being Washington Avenue. The original refusals that were
cited and which is why I asked about the memo of correction as well, there were
some mischaracterizations regarding what was being proposed. The number of parking
spaces were misstated down in a refusal, but the refusals initially were because
is zoned I-2. You have, I-2 does not permit residential use, so we had a
refusal for the additional 37 dwelling units. The FAR for I-2 is 500, we were at 544.
They wrote us up for refusal for a minimum number of accessible spaces. They
were saying two was required and we only provided one, and they had the required
parking for 37 dwelling units. It's a one to two parking requirement, one
space for every two units, and they misstated that we only had a team where
you can see up here in the project description the accurate depiction of 15.
I contacted the examiner. You can see the emails attached, my communications with
the examiner regarding the refusal, and you should now have a corrected refusal.
tab 9 shows our appeal, but at tab 10 you have the memo of correct date of
January 27, 2020, which makes the corrections, eliminates the refusal for
accessible parking, corrects the number of proposed parking spaces to 15, and the
corrected notice of refusal so we had originally had a as corrected we had a
use refusal for the residential uses and we had a FAR refusal and a required
parking refusal I will say that through the meetings we had with SOSNA which is
we had an architectural review committee meeting to community group meetings with
the Kimball Street neighbors them directly a lot of communication back and
forth via email we came up with revised drawings a revised design that has been
presented to the board presently that reduces the far we lopped off the seventh
floor so it's now a four-story addition on top of an existing two-story and you
can see it here in profile. We've reduced the number of dwelling units, excuse me,
to 30, maintaining the 15 off-street parking spaces. We have still one-way
drive, so we've now eliminated the parking refusal. There is no longer a
parking refusal. We have one to two parking as required in I-2 for
industrial or for residential uses. By reducing the FAR to 463 or below five,
at least in any regard below 500 we now have eliminated the FAR refusal. The only
thing that's left is the refusal for use, the proposed residential use, and as I've
indicated and is provided in my exhibit book, the next block up is
coming in for a variance for residential use. Two blocks up has already been
approved. 25th and Washington already has a residential mixed-use project
already almost in construction up there so we've made we made major revisions
you can see in the in the revised plan form if you give me a minute I can pull
If you give me a minute, I can pull that up. If you would take a look at that, that was submitted to the board.
that up if you would take a
You can see the list of changes, significant changes we made with community input.
But there were other non-zoning.
These are just the zoning, what I thought were mostly zoning-related changes to the project to accommodate community input.
There were some other things that were done regarding facade treatments, providing vegetative screening on the rear roof deck that we moved at the request of the community group.
One of the things that came up during a community group meeting is that originally we had, as you
would see by the original plan, the back of our building was only two stories and there was a
deck on top of that. The neighbors across Kimball Street had a concern about people on a roof deck
looking into their third floor bedroom windows or room windows. So we raised the roof height to 38
feet, which is the height that's permitted in RSA 5, which is what's across the
street and further to the east of us. I2 obviously doesn't have a height limit.
Occupied area can be a hundred percent, we're just limited by far. So you could
have a building 500 that occupies a hundred percent of the lot, that's five
stories tall, with no limit on the floor-to-ceiling height. It could be 20
foot floor to ceilings for five floors would be a hundred foot tall building
occupying a hundred percent of the lot. It could be modified in other ways that
500 percent could be spread, 500 FAR could be spread out in different ways and you
can have a building that's much taller at a portion of the property as long
again as the overall FAR is not above 500 percent. And then as you can see from
the original design to now, we then based upon community input we layered Kate, the
back of the building to reduce the shadowing of this building to minimize
the impact on the residents of Kimball Street. There is some existing, one of the
things per the community group, there's some existing signage on the front of
the building. We eliminated quite a bit of it, maintained a projecting sign, one
of the awning signs, and then added a matching awning sign on the opposite
side. So here you can see new signage, existing signage, and that is all in compliance with the
I-2 requirements. Again, you can see Washington Avenue at 100 feet right away, 79 foot cartway,
and then Kimball Street. During the course of our community group meetings, one of the
things we were caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place during the process,
what do we do with the parking? Parking's required. Do we provide less than the required I-2? Do we
provide the amount that's required? Do we provide more than what's required? What we chose to do is
to reduce the number of the density of the building in terms of both the number of floors,
the FAR, and the number of residential dwelling units. We played around with coming in from
Kimball and out on Washington. I mean, ultimately, the residents on Kimball Street were the ones who
were going to be most impacted coming out on the Kimball Street. And their request was that we come
in. Surprisingly, I had originally changed the design when we first went to Saucon to come in
on Kimball from the east coming in and out on Washington, out of concern for lights at night
coming out of the back and shining into the buildings across the street. When we met with
the Kimball Street neighbors, they actually wanted us to go back to the original one-way route, which
was in from Washington, out from Kimball. The reasoning being is that there'll be less traffic
on Kimball Street this way. We come out, we have mostly, as you saw in the trails, we have non-residential
on the south side of Kimball Street to the west of us, and then just only maybe a quarter of the
block or less to the west of us of residences on the north side. So to reduce the impact
upon Kimball Street, they wanted us coming out and heading west on Kimball Street and coming
in, driving down the whole length of Kimball Street, 20th Street to come in and out on
Washington. We also explored coming in and out of Washington with two-way, in and out of Kimball
with two-way. The problem with coming in and out of Kimball with two-way is, I think, is what I
just described to you, would be the additional traffic coming from the east down Kimball Street
that the neighbors did not want. There was a request to reduce or eliminate curb cuts.
There was a request to reduce or eliminate curb cuts, and you're going to hear from Mr. Whalen about that, on Washington Avenue.
We do still have an industrial use here.
We do still have trucks that come.
You can see in the interior photos that I have in my exhibit book.
It's an ongoing industrial use here.
with the width of Kimball Street the cartway only being 14 feet with parking
on one side there is no way physically possible to it's barely wide enough to
get a car down let alone a van or a panel truck or a bigger truck so we need
to maintain some type of parking off of Washington Avenue to serve the existing
residential use and then also as described it was a request of the
neighbors on Kimball Street. So major modifications to the design, both
address and reduce the variances that were originally cited, eliminate some,
drop us down to one, and then also a laundry list of things that we've done
to address points that were raised by the neighbors, by the participants in the
community group meeting. As indicated, we had two meetings with the community
group, one meeting, at least one physical in-person meeting with the residents of
Kimball Street. I had requested a copy of, since our last meeting with SOSTA and
originally at the time of our originally scheduled hearing before the board in
March, I had requested a copy of SOSTA's position letter in this case and
unfortunately it was not provided to us until just Thursday so we weren't fully
able to address any additional comments that they raised in that letter with so
little time for our submission deadline with that being said for now I'm gonna
with the board like me to have the design professional walk you through the
layout of the interior pretty much speaks for itself. One of the things we
did was relocate the bicycle parking, put it for easy access off of Kimball, see
the parking, the two industrial uses to either side, trash storage, mixed
industrial and residential use above, and then residential uses extending on the
upper floors. It's the intentions of the owners of the property to occupy the
upper, the top floor, the unit that's located at the top of the building themselves with their
family. So they will work and live in the same building that's presently being proposed. But
would you like a little more detail from the designer in terms of the floor plans? I have a
question, David, as it relates to the existing business that will continue, the marble tile
manufacturing of uh whatever it is they do uh countertops or whatever how do you is there an
exhaust system or something that's going to be i mean when you're cutting marble and tile
in addition to the noise right it does create a lot of pollutants how's that being addressed
so that would be properly i mean it would have to be if it's not already it would be properly
exhausted. And that would be something that would be designed during the construction phase.
My understanding is that the lion's share of the fabrication is done off-site, that there is
storage of the slabs, as you can see, and the materials on-site, as you can see in my interior
photos which are at tab let's see a tab 15 but and Chelsea Chelsea can you are
you on the are you on she on yet she said she can't I'm hearing that she can't
be heard you sure she's unmuted does she have her hand up did she raise her hand can she have her
raise her hand please sorry about that is she on the phone she's on the she's on the line
she should be on that she's she's on the video chelsea h-u-a-n-g
is it telephone only can you check the phones i'm sorry she was having problems getting long
she may not be able to um and i provided her number so is her last name h-u-a-n-g yes tanya
okay we don't have a chelsea um so if that's the person that's the person yes they can unmute
themselves and speak. But I think they might just be phoning in. Is that also
is that also something with the phone I think she was having problems with the
something with the phone? I think she was having problems with the video.
video well we'll move on and we can get back to that if any board members have
any questions about the interior any any issues were concerning the design
tom are you speak trying to speak if you are here
tom yes i have a question in reference to frank question um i'm assuming that
the counselor is saying that the cutting of some work will be done off-site?
Yeah, I can, I mean, I'll need Chelsea to get on, my client to get on the line to adopt my
statements, but in my conversations with her, it's that the main share of the fabrication is
not done on-site, and it is done elsewhere. I think that there is some fabrication that might
be done there but it's not the lion's share of it if much at all but again I
need her to get on the phone yeah I'd like some clarity on that
there is if there is a one-site fabrication there should be a location
on the floor plans showing where that would take place
yes correct i mean right now we're just showing it you know the general areas where
where these showroom upstairs and then this is the area right now that's being used um
chelsea are you on yes yes okay great can you please speak to about the fabrication that takes
place now and what the plan is for the fabrication moving forward i need her to identify herself
Oh, she needs to be sworn to. I'm sorry. Yep. Yep. Yeah. My name is a child in one.
You swear and affirm or send a firm to, excuse me,
do you swear and affirm the testimony you give today is true to the best of your
ability? Yes. And just real quickly, Chelsea, um, you go by Chelsea, correct?
Yes. Okay. Chelsea, um, you're one of the owners of the property in question.
yes and are you also the owner of the business that presently one of the the owner or one of
the owners of the business the top business that presently operates at the property yes okay and
you i don't know i'm not sure if before you were able unmuted if you heard the questions the
questions have to do with the extent of fabrication that happens presently and the plan of the plan
for on-site fabrication and where that would take place um if this project is approved
yeah we we're doing the fabrication on the uh um the bed of the building presently
don't fabrication
you're cutting tile and cutting marble yeah we're cutting countertop countertop marble stone things
Granite, yes.