City Council Moves to Encourage Better Design, Sustainability

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

Nov. 1 -- Moving a step closer to a more sustainable, aesthetically defined future, the City Council last week voted unanimously to create a new sustainable City taskforce and approved the first draft of new design guidelines for Downtown.

Providing more flexibility to the City’s strict building restrictions, the design guidelines aim to address developers' longstanding complaints that the planning process is unnecessarily lengthy and unpredictable by clearly defining a vision for a Downtown of the future.

The guidelines, with the council's input, were to have been revisited by the Planning Commission and the Architectural Review Board the following night, but the meeting was cancelled for lack of a quorum. (The meeting has been rescheduled for this Wednesday.)

The guidelines also hope to encourage higher quality buildings by streamlining the cumbersome planning review process -- which sometimes keeps a project on the drawing board for more a year -- saving developers money.

Current design restrictions either don’t make sense, or can be improved upon, according to Boris Dramov, whose consulting firm, ROMA Design Group, was hired by the City.

Focusing primarily on 6th and 7th Streets, Dramov said that easing height and setback requirements and reducing expensive parking restrictions could offset the costs of building taller, higher quality buildings with more common areas and larger retail ground floor spaces. The proposal does not add square footage but does call for wider sidewalks and narrower streets.

“In terms of creating variety, the less strict adherence to regulations actually the better the buildings have come out,” said Dramov. The comment appeared to be a critique of what some have called the "micromanaging" tendencies of the Planning Commission and Architectural Review Board, both of which were party to formulating the guidelines.

Restrictions differentiating the heights of buildings -- from lower to higher the further away from the ocean -- is not “perceivable within the community," Dramov said. "It’s not really helping to shape the character of the Downtown in a significant way.”

The same goes for mandated setbacks put in place to avoid “canyonizatio.” The setbacks, Dramov said, are stifling creativity instead of encouraging “great quality buildings” that showcase a variety in designs, he said.

The City, Dramov said, could “offset the cost of building higher-quality units by not requiring so much parking,” which is 1.7 spaces for single and 2.2 for two bedroom units. “I’ve been told that a lot of parking being required is not being used fully,” Dramov said.

Calling the costly parking restrictions the “biggest detriment” to building quality dwellings, Craig Jones, Downtown's biggest developer, said he “would absolutely build along (those) guidelines” if the restrictions were lifted.

“We really need a different streetscape,” Jones added. “If we had better and wider sidewalks, particularly on 6th and 7th Streets, we could get much more ground floor retail and we could probably double the rent.”

Council members generally supported Dramov’s proposals, but were skeptical about the parking reductions and narrowing 7th Street, which is used by freight and fire trucks for the supermarket and fire station on the street.

“Seventh street is not a slow-pokey street,” said Councilman Robert Holbrook. “I just imagine having two lanes only, with left turns and right turns, would just slow things down.”

“I am into narrowing the street, but what is it going to mean to critical services?” asked Councilman Ken Genser. “I think wider sidewalks are nice, but they’re very expensive.”

Mayor Richard Bloom was troubled by Jones’ suggestion that he could double rents if the sidewalks were widened.

“I am concerned that we not develop Downtown into an area that is built for exclusivity," Bloom said. "We are rapidly approaching a time when we have a high end and a low end but no middle end.”

Councilman Michael Feinstein was on the same page when it came to making the parking allowances. “I’d be willing to make the tradeoff on height for parking, but only if we can get affordable housing.”

Before committing to any plan that would reduce parking, Genser wanted to make sure that the area had an adequate number of spaces.

“If we're going to be reducing parking in an area where we’re going to spend ninety-some-odd -million to redo parking, we should do what we did ten years ago with affordable housing," Genser said. "We should go out a measure it, see how much of it is being used.”

Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be building buildings that are going to increase need for parking on the street, but I don’t want to make buildings with empty parking garages.”

It is exactly this need to balance a wide spectrum of concerns that prompted the council in a separate action to create an 11-member Sustainability Advisory Taskforce charged with helping the City implement in five years a recently updated Sustainable City Program.

Replacing the City’s Environmental Taskforce as the main advisory board on sustainability issues, the new group -- driven by the expanded mission of the City Plan -- must include members of two key constituencies for it to work, Holbrook warned.

“It really seems to me the two areas that we have to make certain are really represented are residents and the business community," Holbrok said. "They have to be on this task force as a majority, because they’re going to fight and scream all the way unless they’re involved from the beginning.”

The Council-appointed taskforce will deal with the four original sustainable goals -- resource conservation, environmental and public health, transportation and community and economic development, and the added goals of increasing housing and open space, land use, community education and civic participation, and human dignity.

While defining the composition of the taskforce is vital to creating a fair and comprehensive board, Councilman Genser warned of over-specifying each area of expertise.

“Trying to specify every seat is wrong, Genser said. "We want some general categories represented, but we can appoint the right mix. Why fill a seat with dead wood, when we can have a resident or a businessperson who would be dynamite… We need flexibility.”