Planning Commission Meeting   8/22/2023

include the opportunity to comment on those matters, which comments from the public will be received.

With that, I'll call the meeting to order.

And let's establish a quorum.

Yes.

Good.

Ms.

Oh, well, present.

Doesn't sound like Clayborne.

Mr. Murray, here.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Mr. Murray, I'm sorry.

Well, thank you for that matter.

Oh, yeah, we're gonna have some food for you then.

That's so good to hear.

All right, next on the agenda are other matters that are listed on the agenda from the public.

Would anybody like to address the commission under that line item?

I see one hand raised.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Tom Olivier from the Samuel Miller district.

I've come this evening to comment on the importance of addressing limits in the comprehensive plan update.

The basics are simple.

The earth is finite.

Being mammals, we require biological and physical inputs for our sustenance.

Hence, limits exist to our presence on earth.

In recent centuries, technological advances have allowed us to expand our presence.

Of course, technology hasn't erased earthly limits.

It has simply allowed us to claim more of the planetary pie.

In 1972, the Club of Rome published a report titled The Limits to Growth.

The reports presented findings of a model of the world built by scientists using system dynamics and computer simulations.

The model explored interactions of population, natural resources, industrial and agricultural production, and pollution.

Modeling showed that, guess what, growth cannot continue indefinitely, and if we do not change our ways, ecological crises and a collapse of societies, likely in the 21st century, would take place.

The report warned 50 years ago, entirely new approaches are required to redirect society toward goals of equilibrium rather than growth.

The limits of growth has stood the test of time.

Indeed, global computer models drawn on in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make clear that we now have scant time left to reduce our impacts on the planet and to restore our planet's ecosystems.

As someone who trained and worked as a life scientist, I'm perplexed and dismayed by the lack of acknowledgement in the comprehensive plan update of the extent of ecological crises now, the need to protect natural systems, and the need to live within ecological limits.

For example, at your work session last week, why weren't there toolkits for natural resource conservation and climate action?

are we still so mired in magical thinking about the feasibility of endless growth that we are unwilling to face the limits of growth and address ecological crises in this comprehensive plan?

All right, thank you.

Is there anyone else who would like to speak?

Okay, seeing none, we'll move to the next item on the agenda, which is approval of the consent agenda.

And I do have one question for staff.

I just noticed this, the agenda that I have here had item B removed, which was the VA 2023 quadruple zero three 3676 Twin Creek Road.

And on the hard copy in front of me, it's not there.

Just wanted to make sure that the consent agenda we act on is the one online.

I just noticed that.

It looks like the printed version is not our online version.

But my understanding is that these copies are only the ones that are available right here in this room.

Yes.

OK, so online is the way to go.

OK, got it.

OK, so before you, you'll have two sets of documents or three sets of documents, two of which are meeting minutes, July 11th and July 25th.

And then item B, Twin Creek Road.

Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

Any further discussion?

Yes.

Mr. Murray?

Aye.

Mr. Missel?

Aye Ms.

Next on the list, we'll move into our public hearings, which we have three tonight.

The first one is ZTA 2023, quadruple zero five, county-wide certificate of appropriateness.

Thank you.

Good evening commissioners.

I'm Margaret Malyszewski.

I'm one of the managers in the planning division of community development.

I don't get to present to you very often.

I spend most of my time with the architectural review board working with entrance quarters.

And tonight I am going to present to you an entrance quarter related zoning text amendment.

I'm going to start with a little bit of background on the entrance quarters.

Some of you may not be familiar with them, and I'll just try to give you a little context for tonight's request.

The entrance corridors were first established in Albemarle County in 1990.

Entrance corridors are streets that run to or through the historic areas of the county and the city, and they were established to help ensure that the character of new development is consistent with the historic character of the county.

And that's done by establishing an architectural review board that applies design guidelines to the review of new development in the corridors.

Any development that falls within the entrance border overlay and requires a site plan or a site plan amendment or a building permit requires approval from the ARB.

And we call that approval a certificate of appropriateness.

When the entrance quarters were first established, and for many years thereafter, every application that fell into those categories was presented to the ARB in an ARB meeting.

In 2009, we took steps to streamline that process.

And in 2010, the Board of Supervisors approved a ZTA that established a new class of certificate of appropriateness, and that's called a countywide certificate of appropriateness.

The process was streamlined by making 11 types of development available for staff level entrance corridor review.

Those 11 categories are types of development that are relatively small in scope or that are expected to have lesser visual impact on the entrance corridor streets.

And those are the 11 categories that you see listed on that slide.

For each category of countywide certificate, the ordinance requires that the ARB first establish design criteria that will be used for the review of the subsequent countywide applications.

So the ARB establishes the design criteria and then staff review individual proposals against those criteria.

In 2021,

A 12th category was added to the list and that was done as part of the ZTA to establish the Rio 29 form-based code.

So that streamlined staff level review is available form-based code development proposals that also fall within the entrance quarter overlay.

Knight's proposal is to add another category to the list of countywide certificates.

This one would be for sites that are subject to public-private partnership agreements that have been executed by the county.

Adoption of the ZTA would allow for streamlined entrance corridor review of any development subject to such an agreement.

You'll see in your staff report that the ZTA proposal has been reviewed for all the typical factors that the board wants to be considered for a ZTA.

In most cases,

The addition of this category of countywide certificate has no direct impact on those factors.

Instead, those factors would have been already evaluated at the time the board considered establishing the partnership.

What's Before You Tonight is a request to make a recommendation on the addition of that one line of text that's highlighted on that slide, adding that to the entrance quarter overlay section of the code to allow for more efficient review of development proposals on properties that are subject to public-private partnership agreements that have been executed by the county.

That is all of my presentation.

All right, thank you.

Commissioners, any questions?

I think I understand this, but I just want to say it out loud to make sure I do.

This is not giving a blank check for the use at a particular location.

Just one comment and a question.

I guess I'll start with the question.

Just to be sure, if staff determines that there's a need to bring it to the ARB, you can still do that as part of this process.

That's right.

And then just a comment as being part of the ARB, I've found these certificates or the county-wide certificates of appropriateness difficult to say, but they're actually very helpful in terms of streamlining the process.

Any other questions?

All right, well, with that, I will open the public hearing.

Has anyone signed up from the public to speak?

All right, well, with that, I will close the public hearing.

Okay.

Any further deliberations before I'm prepared to make a motion?

All right.

I'm happy to make a motion.

Is there a second?

Second.

Any further discussion?

Yes, Mr. Bivins?

Ms.

Firehock?

Aye.

All right.

Madam Clerk, I think something just happened to your volume while you were calling the roll.

All right.

Moving to the next item on the docket here is SP 2023, quadruple zero three Mill Creek lot 11, independent office one industrial.

Good evening, Supervisors.

My name is Andy Bartolock and I'm a commissioner.

Just for a second then.

Good evening, commissioners.

Sorry about that.

My name is Andy Reidelbach and I am a senior planner with the Albemarle County Planning Division.

Tonight, you have before you a request for a special use permit, special use SP202300003, known as Mill Creek Lot 11.

To provide some context on the location of this property, it is located in the industrial section of the Mill Creek planned unit development off of Stony Ridge Road, and I've highlighted the subject parcel for this application.

You can see Southern Parkway going east-west across the bottom of the screen, and then Avon Street going diagonally from the southwest to the northeast up to I-64, which is on the very top right portion of the screen.

This slide shows a zoomed in aerial of the property with Stony Ridge Road on the west side of the property.

And then the parcel also has frontage on Five Springs Road, which is on the east side of the property.

And this slide just shows some of the nearby businesses, an auto paint supply shop, a tree service business, a dental office in the office building down at the bottom of the screen, and then a dog daycare to the south southwest of the subject parcel.

This property is known as TMP 76 M1-11.

It is approximately 1.35 acres in size.

As I mentioned, it has frontage on two roads, Stony Ridge and Five Springs.

The zoning is PUD, planned unit development, and that is the Mill Creek PUD, and it is in the designated industrial section.

The parcel also has some managed steep slopes in it.

It is also in the airport impact area overlay district.

And I just wanted to point out that this is the last undeveloped parcel in the industrial section of the Mill Creek PUD.

And in the Southern and Western Urban Neighborhoods Master Plan, the property is designated for industrial uses.

This slide just shows the zoning of the site PUD, which is the teal aqua color.

There is one large parcel to the west zoned light industry and then there are some residential properties farther to the east.

And then the residential section of the Mill Creek PUD is south on the south side of Southern Parkway.

You can kind of see the edge of that in the bottom center of the screen.

And this slide just shows additional context, this time for the Southern and Western Urban Neighborhoods Master Plan, showing that the subject parcel and all of the surrounding properties are all designated for industrial uses.

And then some of the more peripheral uses include institutional, where the armory and jail are located, urban density residential, which is the lakeside apartment complex, and then neighborhood density residential, which are some of the homes in Mill Creek.

So looking at the specifics of this request, this special use permit application is a request for a special use permit to allow the construction of an independent office within a structure that was not established or vested until after April the 3rd, 2014.

So of course, since this parcel is undeveloped currently, there is no building that was established or vested before that date.

And so I provided some definitions as well so that you can understand what an independent office is, especially since this property is in a area designated for industrial use.

And so an independent office is an office that is located within an industrial district that is not an industrial office.

and an industrial office is defined as an office that is owned and operated by the same business entity engaged in this list of industrial uses that are located in either the county or it can be in the city of Charlottesville where the office provides services to the industrial use but which need not be on the same site as the industrial use.

So essentially an independent office is an office

for any type of commercial use that is not related in any way to a designated industrial use in the county's comprehensive plan.

So what the applicant is requesting is to, they're looking to put a building on this parcel.

And so they're looking at having a buy right warehouse use on the lower level of the building.

And that would be approximately 8,300 square feet.

And the warehouse use would be accessed from the west side of the property off of Stony Ridge Road.

And then the special use permit is really for the upper level of the building.

And that is where the applicant proposes to put this independent office use and it would not be associated with the warehouse down on the lower level.

And so the independent office use is for 8900 square feet.

And as I said, that's on the upper level and it would be accessed from the east side of the property from Five Springs Road.

So this is just a slide showing the concept plan in the proposed building with the driveway on the west on Stony Ridge Road.

That would be the way that the owner accesses the warehouse use.

And then on the east side from Five Springs Road where that entrance in the parking lot is, that would serve the independent office use on the upper level.

And this slide also shows just a screenshot from the concept plan that the applicant provided showing the elevation of the building and how, because of the slope of the land and the way the building is built into that slope, why the warehouse use is accessed from the lower level off of Stony Ridge Road and the independent office use on the upper level from Five Springs Road.

So looking at factors for consideration,

is staff did its analysis and is further described in the staff report.

There were several positive aspects of the independent office use proposal.

The proposed use will continue to provide a mixture of uses in the area which is something that a planned unit development promotes.

The proposed use does not prevent buy right industrial uses from also operating on the site.

Of course, the applicant does intend to provide that buy right warehouse use on the lower level.

And even though the proposed office use is for an independent office, that would not prevent the property owner from some point in the future, perhaps renovating that office use for some other use, including an office use that does serve an approved industrial use.

and there are no adverse impacts expected to nearby or adjacent properties and there were no concerns identified with this request.

So staff does recommend approval of special use permit SP 2023-3 Mill Creek lot 11 with the following two conditions.

One is the standard condition that we often put on special use permits that the development must be in general accord with the concept plan provided, especially the following essential major elements, including the proposed building, the parking and loading areas, and the sidewalk.

The sidewalk connects the two sides of the building, the warehouse use and the proposed independent office use.

And of course, minor modifications to the plan would be permitted as long as they don't conflict with the elements, the listed elements to ensure compliance with the zoning ordinance.

And then the independent office use must not exceed 9,000 square feet of space in the proposed building.

Since the applicant was requesting the 8,900 square feet, we decided to round it up to 9,000 to allow some flexibility at the site planning stage and as they built out the building.

So then I also wanted to provide some updates on this application.

Since the staff report was published, the applicant has indicated an interest in increasing the maximum square footage of this independent office use from the 8,900 square feet that was identified in the project narrative and the concept plan in the staff report.

to 11,000 square feet.

So that would be an increase of about 2,100 square feet.

And my understanding is that the applicant does intend to discuss this proposal in their presentation.

However, I just wanted to let you all know that staff have not had an opportunity at this time to review any sort of revised plans based on this new proposal.

And the staff cannot provide a full analysis of this proposed change increasing the independent office use by 2100 square feet.

So staff's analysis and recommendation in this presentation this evening remains based on that original request for the 8900 square feet of independent office space.

And that's all I have for this evening.

So if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you.

Thank you for a great report.

Commissioners, I'll start with Commissioner Moore.

Not particularly, no.

It seems relatively straightforward compared to someone we get.

I don't know when to ask this question, but I'll ask it now.

So with the change in square footage requested, just to clarify,

There was a CAC meeting, there was a public input opportunity.

There isn't a public opportunity for the new 11,000 square foot number.

Does this act as that public input opportunity?

I guess my understanding is this would be the public input opportunity.

If the commission wanted to move forward with this there wouldn't be any additional opportunities for the public to comment until it goes to the board of course and at that point if the commission were to recommend the approval of the additional square footage then that would be part of the staff report when it goes to the board so that would really be the only opportunity for

Great, thank you.

I noticed that there were no comments.

Great, okay, thank you.

So Chair, I would just offer that an attempt to sort of say this is in fact, if in fact a music studio and a recording operation goes in there, that in fact is not out of sync with manufacturing, storage and distribution, because the work of that is while it's electronic, it is still making something.

and assuming that it gets recorded, it is still going to get recorded and it's going to be distributed.

So I am not of the mind that this is out of sync with what's there when, in fact, this is just a different way of working in an industrial space.

I would kindly ask staff or exactly, well, you know, after I'm saying it now, I disagree with that this is out of sync and think that this, in fact, is an appropriate use for that space, given it's just simply a different mode of manufacturing.

Yes, so the office space is the part that requires the special use permit

So maybe we need to fix our zoning definitions at some point too.

Sounds like, anyway.

All right.

Good evening Chair Clayborne, members of the commission.

My name is Kelsey Schlein.

I'm a planner with Shimp Engineering.

I'm here tonight representing Emmanuel Zuns, who's the contract purchaser of tax parcel 76M11, which is the subject of this special use permit request.

Also here with me tonight is Dick Abidin with Artisan Construction.

He is also working with the property owner on moving this project forward.

Sorry about that.

So Emmanuel Zunz is the founder of OneRPM, which is a music marketing company and digital distribution and fan engagement platform.

We've arrived at this proposal before you tonight for a request for an independent office within an industrial designated portion of a planned unit development.

after a long search for a piece of property for Mr. Zuns to realize his vision and after quite a bit of investigation into the history of this property in coordination with staff to determine whether an office would be permitted by right in this zoning district.

Mr. Zun had been looking for a warehouse property to garage his vehicles for quite some time.

However, when he came across this piece of property, he saw the vision and the opportunity for something more.

A space for warehousing, storage, garage space for his vehicles on the first floor and a space on the upper floors for the operations of his music business and also just music collaboration, inviting in local artists to work on their craft and to market themselves as local musicians.

Next slide here.

So the property, as Andy described, is part of what was formerly known as the Forest Hills PUD back when it was originally approved in 1985.

This property being adjacent to the Forest Hill PUD was then incorporated into what we now know as the Mill Creek PUD.

in 1995.

Since there was no provision in that 1995 zoning or listed permitted uses within the PUD, adopted application plan, the buy rate uses within this district default to the plan development industrial district.

And after ZTA in 2014, independent offices became by special use permit.

And so that is largely why we are here before you tonight.

So looking at the surrounding context, the Mill Creek PUD industrial area and the adjacent light industrial portion, over time since its original adoption, has adapted into a mixture of uses, industrial and commercial.

I will say the PUD was adopted and this area was designated as industrial.

And after the construction of the builders first source, I believe it was the FedEx

property that developed next.

And so those large parcels where the topography was able to be managed to serve those larger industrial uses did come online first and they did develop and kind of serve that intent of the industrial designation portion, designated portion of the PUD.

over time, and especially for the properties like this one that are in between Stony Ridge Road and Five Springs Road, the topography is much more extreme.

And so I think you'll see that over time, so we've called out here, a lot of those users in that area have developed as a preschool, doggy daycare, medical offices, and several of the uses within the PUD have been subject to prior special use permits and zoning map amendments.

Looking at the surrounding context here, so kind of right at the end across from Saba Knife is the property.

We're looking from Five Springs Road and just calling out some additional context of the south side offices.

A building that's two story above grade and built into the hillside, so it's three stories from the rear and two stories from the front.

So I have some building renderings to share with you tonight as well of what we're proposing, but wanted to call attention to the existing context of the site and what surrounds this area.

So here we're looking from Five Springs Road.

The trees towards the front is the property that we're looking at.

And we're just calling attention to with the yellow line, just the grade change that is across the property, which I'll go into a little further detail later on with the cross section.

And so here you can see that the elevation at one end of the property is approximately 490 and the other end is approximately 454.

So quite a relatively significant topographic change across the property.

And that's why you see many of the buildings here nestled in between Five Springs Road and Stony Ridge Road have been built into the hillside.

A lot of them are a story over basement or two story over basement.

And that is our proposal here before you tonight.

So this is the site concept that we have that Andy shared with you all.

So access from Stony Ridge Road, that would be for kind of the warehouse garage access.

The access from Five Springs Road would be primarily for the music studio use.

And Andy briefly mentioned this in his presentation, but one item just after further coordination with the project team and just finalizing some calculations after the staff report was released, and I'll share with you the building concept in a minute while you see where we finalized those calculations on the third floor.

We would like to request that the commission consider a condition to permit the office space for up to 11,000 square feet as opposed to 9,000 square feet, which is put forward in the staff report.

And so here's an explanation of why.

So on the ground floor, we have the warehouse office.

So right now we're looking from Stony Ridge Road.

So this is the warehouse area accessed.

And so it's three stories from Stony Ridge, two stories from the other side.

And the office area is on the second floor music studio.

And on the third floor,

There's kind of an additional office space imagined as collaboration space and kind of just a really interesting space for music and artists to gather and collaborate with one another.

There is, you can see, a terrace that is up there.

And at the time when we originally submitted this, we were just solidifying how much of the area would be enclosed.

And so the 11,000 square feet just provides us with enough flexibility at site plan and building permitting where we can enclose some additional area up on that third floor.

And so I wanted to present you with that rendering so that you can understand where the additional 2,000 square feet and our request is coming from.

As far as the footprint that we presented in our concept plan, that remains the same.

It's largely that additional square footage is focused exclusively on the third floor and how much space will be enclosed.

Quickly, just looking at some impacts, because I do understand that it's 2,000 additional square feet that we're considering.

I think in this area, the impacts will be minimal.

And so just kind of calling out from the IT Generation Manual 11th edition,

just the difference in peak hour trips.

So from 8900 which was evaluated to 11,000 square foot which we would request that you consider tonight.

We're looking at an increase of three peak hour trips in the morning and five peak hour trips in the evening.

This is again taken from the trip generation manual

I will say, as far as the music studio use, I don't think the traffic will be quite as high.

But just for the purposes of evaluating impacts for the use proposed, I wanted to present this information to you.

We are not requesting any increase in height from the Bywright District, and so just wanted to clarify that with the additional square footage, we will still be within the 65 foot height maximum, well within that.

And so just wanted to confirm that item with you all.

And then looking here, as Andy mentioned, this is the last undeveloped property within the industrial designated portion of the Mill Creek PUD.

And so to the left, I'm calling out the 2013, which was before the ZTA, which required offices by special use permit was adopted and after.

So a lot of the site was already developed and that's largely

what you see today.

And that remains the case.

I think that these properties that were in between Five Springs Road and Stony Ridge Road were likely the most challenging to develop given the topographic challenges there.

But also those topographic conditions lend themselves much better to smaller buildings and much better to different type of user than an industrial than a typical industrial user.

So anyway, I just wanted to call

I guess attention to the fact that this remains the only undeveloped parcel.

And I think that's today probably largely because this type of user is the ideal user from the site.

But we have to go through some additional approvals to get to that point.

Just the last item that I'll note is that when the board adopted the ZTA back in 2014, and I think a real driver for that in the staff report and in the minutes was just to

looking at some economic development goals of the county to preserve industrial land and to prevent premature conversion or just conversion of industrially zoned properties to commercial.

I think in this case, this property likely will never serve that industrial purpose as a whole for a large economic industrial driver and we really feel that this is a good use and a good proposal

and a good use of this land, which is the last undeveloped property in the Mill Creek PUD.

All right.

Thank you.

Any questions for the applicant?

I'll start to my left.

I will thank you once again for presenting your illustrations in a way that I don't have to strain to read the final notes.

Thank you for doing that.

I certainly appreciate that.

I will also ask you, do you have a Five Springs Road elevation?

with your desired piece.

That's the back end, I think.

Do you have a front end?

Because it's going to be a different footprint compared to the sort of vanilla box that's next to it.

Yeah, and I could probably bring that up for you.

And I could definitely have that answer for you in a response period.

I'll look forward to that in your response.

OK, thank you.

Hi, thank you for a great presentation.

Just a couple quick questions.

One, you mentioned that there's no impact on the building footprint.

Sure, sure.

I mean, so the final parking calculation is definitely going to be in the final square footage of this building is ultimately going to be a large coordination with staff and designating either the net area or coordinating with them on an exact study of how many people are going to be accessing the site every day.

Yeah, gotcha.

Okay, great.

Thanks.

Got it.

Okay.

That's all.

Thank you.

All right.

I'm just going to ask a question, but I'll preface it by saying I'm actually not concerned about the traffic from the site.

So I was confused about, or I don't know if confused is the right word, just concerned about the trip generation calculation.

I understand use IT manual, blah, blah, blah.

But it seems like if people are working on recordings and music things, and my family's done a lot of this,

People come and they work for two or three hours and then they go.

I think that, no, thank you for that question.

I think that's a good point.

So we look to the IT manual as the standard and as just for before you're requesting Office and so evaluating Office.

As far as the music user, I think that that type of user

Maybe in a day, I think might be comparable to an office, but I think that the time that people come and go might be a little different.

Whereas in the office, everybody comes at once and leaves at once.

I think, I mean, that's probably the max in a day of how many people would go to the site in a day.

All right.

And then on the top floor, so some of it was going to be open space and I understand it's on a slope, so you can't necessarily see it from Avon Street.

I'm just trying to get a sense, is it, is there a potential, I mean, it's industrial area, but is there a potential for people to be out in the open space part, making noise, laughing?

You know, I don't know if there's,

Any concern with an impact from that?

Because when I saw it at the CAC, I thought it was a two-story completely enclosed building.

This doesn't look like what we saw.

And I know we just saw a very basic rendering at that time.

Yeah.

But trying to understand if there will be any impacts from the open air top part.

I mean, I can't imagine that there would be any, you know, impact beyond like a normal office user, people going outside, having lunch, you know, maybe their

I think throughout the day there is noise from other users.

Although it might be pleasant to have lunch or something like that outside, it might not be pleasant to do anything more than that.

There's all things possible right there.

There's 54 dogs barking outside.

There's, you know, there's various noises that come from the area.

So I would say, I mean, as far as any noise that would come from this user, it wouldn't be, you know, any more impactful than the nearby users, I would say.

And very just kind of typical of

OK.

Correct.

Yeah, because it kind of goes both ways with that of like, you know, maybe you don't want to hear the music, but also the music recording and the quality of the sound.

You don't want to hear anything outside.

OK.

Commissioner Moore?

All right.

I just do have one question.

It was about the warehouse use.

And I think you said that the applicant was going to be storing cars there.

Is it just garage, like storage?

No automotive repair.

It's really collectible cars.

All right.

Thank you.

All right, well, with that, I will ask to see if there's anyone from the public to speak to this, and then I'll provide some time for your response.

Okay.

Is there anyone signed up to speak?

Okay.

No one in person.

All right.

With that, I'll turn it back over to the applicant.

If you have the image, I'd love to see the image, but you're usually so very responsive.

I think our front floor elevation, you asked the question I have to answer.

So it'll be lower than five streets.

That's what I wanted to see.

How much higher of that total elevation was the top floor wing?

I'm good.

All right.

Thank you.

With that, I will close the public hearing.

And I'll bring it back in.

Is there any other things that we need to discuss regarding these proposals?

Seeing heads nodding, that means no.

I am prepared to make a motion.

If I could have the cheat sheet, that would be helpful.

So I would have to essentially amend this to add

OK, if I don't do this correctly, I move that the Planning Commission recommend approval of SP 2023-3 Mill Creek lot 11 with the conditions as recommended by staff in the staff report and the amendment to go

That's for the industrial office piece.

Yes.

Thank you.

Second.

All right.

Any further discussion?

Yes.

Ms.

Firehock.

Aye.

All right.

Thank you.

With that, we'll move on to our final public hearing, SP 2023.

Thank you.

quadruple zero one covenant school tennis court.

Thank you, Chair Clayborne.

I'm Rebecca Ragsdale, Planning Manager with Community Development and I'll be presenting this item this evening.

Thanks for your patience as I get set up here.

And I did just get a new computer.

So working on those kinks.

So this is the proposal before you this evening is a special use permit amendment associated with the existing covenant upper school located off of Hickory Street in the county.

And the proposal is to incorporate a recently acquired parcel.

into the school's campus.

So this map shows you where the existing school campus is outlined in yellow.

and then the proposed parcel to be added which has frontage on Stagecoach Road.

That parcel is about 2.61 acres and the existing campus is about 25.93 acres.

So you can see where the primary entrance to the site is from Hickory and there are existing athletic fields with parking to the rear of the primary school academic building.

The parcel and parcels to the north are zoned R2 residential and then nearby we have the Southwood community and then in white zoned rural area is future Biscuit Run Park which will also have some access and

parking from Hickory Street down to the trails.

It is recommended neighborhood density residential in the comprehensive plan.

The existing school was approved in 1999 early 2000s.

and you see a number of private schools come before you in neighborhood density or urban density designated areas.

They are a typical secondary use that the comprehensive plan anticipates provided that impacts to abutting property owners are addressed.

The applicants provided a narrative and a concept plan which shows the intended use of the property which is on the screen.

It is introducing athletic fields closer to nearby residential units and there will be accessed off of stagecoach.

This is a secondary access.

As I mentioned, the primary access for parking and those going to the courts will be from existing parking

from the Hickory side of the campus.

It is an introduction of six tennis courts, about six parking spaces limited to primarily ADA or service vehicles.

The applicant has worked to reduce that from the original proposal of 12 spaces to six.

The plan does provide for some buffer and screening

along the property line with the closest dwellings.

This special use permit, as I mentioned, was originally approved late 1999, early 2000.

It included, as we typically do, a requirement that commercial buffer and screening requirements be met.

So that is an area where it is reduced, but the screening will still be provided.

The community meeting was held in March and we have heard from some of those closest neighbors regarding concerns about lighting, noise, traffic.

So the applicant has worked to address that in the proposal and also staff has recommended some additional conditions specific to the tennis courts that are getting closer to the neighbors' properties.

Our primary concerns were noise and

and lighting.

The applicant provided a lighting plan but that wasn't one of the conditions that we had originally introduced.

So we have some updates to the recommended special use permit conditions which are intended to get at those considerations for abutting property owners impacts and change of character.

which we did note as somewhat of a concern since it is getting closer into that neighborhood there.

So our standard condition number one is that the property would be developed in general accord, must be developed, so that's the update to that condition from your staff report with regard to the location of buildings, parking areas and athletic facilities, entrances, buffers and screening.

Now this is an update to the conditions, the older conditions, so these will replace the existing ones and we've modernized them to our standard language and as I said in the staff report and limited those that were references to ordinance requirements already.

or things that have been satisfied.

But what we have maintained or modernized is the general accord condition with the plan.

They are not proposing any changes to the existing campus or an increase enrollment in enrollment, so that would remain at 550 students maximum.

The condition for compliance with commercial setbacks and buffers and screening is maintained, but we do, if this concept plan is approved or recommended for approval as is, must make that exception for where it is narrower.

And I should have mentioned that that is a minimum of a 20 foot undisturbed buffer with screening is the commercial requirement.

So it will be reduced in terms of the buffer but the screening must be provided to address some of the concerns about noise and lighting.

We had recommended hours of operation condition.

Those hours you may be familiar with come from other sections, noise generating activities in other parts of the code.

We are learning about other racket sports and the increase in potential noise impacts.

So those have been prohibited.

In this case, it will be limited to the quieter tennis courts.

and we've also, as presented by the applicant, that this would be tennis courts that are primarily in accessory use, used for school activities, not open to other tennis organizations.

We know we have an active tennis community.

They might like to use the courts, but in terms of impacts to those residents.

That's why we had introduced those initial six conditions.

There's been some questions and lighting, questions about lighting that we just received.

Yesterday, we sent those concerns to the applicant.

We let them know we were contemplating a seventh condition.

In terms of the lighting ordinance,

The lighting ordinance requires full cutoff for lighting above 3,000 lumens.

So we suggested a condition regardless of lumens that lighting shall be full cutoff.

The ordinance and the plan they provided does demonstrate compliance with the ordinance, but in terms of spillover, the ordinance allows a half a foot candle to property adjacent properties.

So we've recommended that there be no spillover.

allowed to properties under different ownership.

The 2.6 acres hasn't been incorporated with the existing parcel, the school campus, so we've included a provision where that would not apply, that the ordinance allowed spillover could take place.

So that is

Thank you for the report.

Turn it over to the Commission and see what questions we have.

Kind of curious about the Condition 6, the one where nobody else can use it except for the school activities.

When

We have resources like a bunch of tennis courts that are new and nice.

It would be nice to, if the owner were up for it, to have those available to other organizations.

No, I'm also learning more about pickleball and paddles.

So thank you.

Commissioner Firehock.

Thanks.

Ms.

Ragsdale, I appreciate it.

Just a couple of quick questions.

One is the maximum enrollment not exceeding the 550 students.

I probably should know the answers, but is this amending the existing special use permit that has that requirement on it?

I'm just curious, excuse me, I'm just curious as to why we have to put a limitation on the enrollment in this application.

Got it.

OK, thank you.

The other question you answered, I think 20 foot setback, right?

Yeah, and that's 20 feet for parking adjacent, correct?

Yeah, okay.

And then the last question I think is just around paddle and pickleball.

Is the reason that we're limiting because there's a perceived reality, I guess, that's the thing, perceived reality?

of pickleball balls having a clicking sound that's louder or is there actually a decibel level measured that causes this to trigger some sort of a limit on the county's tolerance for sound?

It's based on recent experience in sound measurements that we've taken at other facilities and complaints from neighbors where the facility started with just tennis.

And then it's pickleball is a very social sport.

It's, I think, probably more of the nuisance.

I don't recall what the decibel levels are.

But it's not, I think it kind of goes back to, as this was presented, tennis courts that to serve a school use, we understand it could be an amenity and

I just wondered if it was subjective or objective.

Okay, good to know.

Almost double.

Thank you.

That's it.

All right.

Question carries on.

So quick question again on the limitations.

So you have the 10 p.m.

to 7 a.m.

Is that assumed throughout the week?

Yeah, that's any day of the week.

Any day of the week.

At the CAC meeting the applicant was repeatedly asked about the need for lighting and we didn't get a satisfactory answer so maybe we will when they come up but they said that most of their matches would end by 5.30

and so it was really unclear why they needed lighting.

And so I could imagine a scenario like, let's say it was getting dark and the game was going late and some delay and blah, blah, blah, and it needed to be lit till six.

But I don't see why, given what they said at the CAC, why it would now need to be till 10 p.m.

when they said they would not be having evening matches.

So I don't understand that condition.

The applicant themselves said in the meeting over and over that they were not going to be playing tennis.

7, 8, 9 o'clock at night.

This is a starting point for discussion and that staff developed that condition based on kind of a noise lens and also we know with conditions of approval we don't want to be overly restrictive and they have to come back to amend it if they have morning practices before school or I'm not sure how late practices go.

I mean I think the matches

have been the most concerning in terms of traffic and noise impacts.

But that was our starting point.

And the applicant would be up.

We can continue that dialogue there as well.

So I guess one of the overarching questions that I have is not about this, but since this is an adjustment to the SUP,

Well, thank you for that question.

So Hickory Street has a private maintenance agreement.

It's a private road.

There's three parties to that.

And the agreement is still in place.

So when you were having conversations with the applicant, was there a conversation about, well, if you've been playing a tonsiller, which has four courts, why do you need two additional ones?

because it seemed to me that their program, while an emerging program, do you have the time or will you have the need for two additional courts when you've been playing in a location?

If you've been playing a tonsil, maybe you've been playing a Penn Park.

And perhaps I'm saying this so that the applicant can be prepared to speak to the number of courts that they need there.

Because it seems to me that what's one way to mitigate some of the impact on the neighbors.

But now I'm going to do the other thing.

So this piece of property sits also between the police department at our 5th Street and was wondering whether or not our police department and the emergency response vehicles that leave there, if they ever leave there under siren.

Because if they do, then this is a piece of property that has noise on the west side at all times of the night.

as opposed to having some noise playing tennis, particularly now that there's a prohibition against pickleball on the other side.

And so those are two different questions.

A, did you talk about the number of courts?

And B, did you talk about, are we aware that this, for us to be aware that this is next to the police station where this piece of property is situated, so there's activity already in that area?

The other piece that I just want to sort of say, and perhaps the applicant can speak to this.

So I think there's like four or five different sports activities over there.

There's certainly a baseball, softball field, which is probably the same field.

There's a football field over there, and I think there's a soccer or the other football type of football field over there.

So this is an area where there's a lot of sports going on at all times.

And the baseball field, if we look where the baseball diamond is, it is actually right behind a whole bunch of people's

I think the soccer field, other football field, is also behind a bunch of people so that there's a bunch of stuff over there that's about being school and so if we could hear something from the applicant about what it's like to be school sports over there and how they engage with their applicants because while I think I don't have an issue with

with tennis.

In fact, I used to play tennis at one point in my life.

I'm wondering why we need six courts as opposed to four courts.

And then my last, my penancement question for them is, why do we need an entrance off the stagecoach road?

Why couldn't we have an entrance that's built into the back of the school and give, and in fact, give the people, perhaps have a balloted entrance if there's an emergency to get a kid out of there, if in fact the kid hurts his or herself.

But why do we have to have a dedicated entrance off of Stagecoach Road?

So I've just tipped my hand.

I'm not expecting you to answer any of it.

I'm not expecting you to answer any of that.

Understood.

Well, I think with that, we can move to the applicant.

So I will open up the public hearing.

Hi, good evening.

My name is Eric Wooley.

I'm with Wooley Engineering.

Happy to be here.

I really enjoy the healthy dialogue.

We're excited to be here and present the proposed tennis courts for the Covenant School.

I'm joined this evening by Frank Berry.

He's the CFO and CEO of the Covenant School.

We're very appreciative of Rebecca's efforts in getting us to this position.

I think she did an excellent job of giving you the basics.

We have a lot to talk about.

We have a very limited amount of time, so I'm going to give you guys a really brief and quick overview of some of the highlights of how we got to where we are.

What are our key design considerations that made this layout the way we're presenting today?

Thank you so much for allowing us to come.

I'm going to be very brief.

I just wanted to give you a little overview of the Covenant School.

If you're not familiar with us, Covenant School was founded in 1985.

We're a pre-K through 12 day school.

We have two campuses.

Our lower school, our elementary school is at the old McIntyre High School over here on the bypass.

That's pre-K through five.

The campus we're talking about now, the Hickory campus, is where we have our middle school and our high school.

Total enrollment is 740.

The Hickory campus that we were talking about a moment ago that Rebecca was covering, it has 425 students right now.

Just a background on who we are.

40% financial aid, that's really important to us.

We want the Covenant School to be accessible to the community, and so that's a core value.

Community service is very, very important.

You'll see on the next slide, we really emphasize with our students about what kind of life do you want to live and to live well and get back to your community.

So that's a core value of what we do.

As I mentioned, I kind of hit that already.

Kind of our tagline is teaching the next generation to live well.

We really emphasize with our students that we need to be good neighbors and be present in our community and thus the community service that I mentioned before.

As far as the tennis courts, and I'll tee it back up for Eric, the tennis courts for the Covenant School is something that we've been thinking about and dreaming about for about 25 years.

It's an important part of our athletic program, and I'll let Eric walk you through that.

All right, here we go.

So here's our layout plan.

A couple of key little things I'd like to point out just for orientation.

North is up at Stagecoach Road along the north.

You've already seen some other exhibits that show Hickory Street is along just off the page here, the entrance coming into the school and the existing parking lot.

So the school originally had proposed 12 parking spaces.

We heard from the CAC meeting a lot of resistance to that, that people were fearful that that was going to generate a lot of traffic.

That's actually welcome news to the school.

They didn't really want to put in 12 spaces.

12 spaces was the county mandated minimum.

Excuse me.

Typical minimum.

What the school proposes to do is to require all the visiting teams, all the visiting parents, the students that play, the parents, all the visitors to park in the existing parking lot at the school and then walk up two new pathways.

This one will be stairs and this one will be a long

steady, easy walking path up.

So the idea is that the parking lot that serves the tennis courts is really just for ADA and anybody else that has difficulty going up a significant amount of grade change.

Also, we wanted to highlight that the light green areas are the existing vegetation that we intend to remain.

The dark green areas are the new vegetation that we're proposing.

Right here is a small new building that would service storage for the tennis facilities and also two bathrooms.

Interconnecting all these courts, we have ADA accessible pathways, all leading from an ADA accessible parking lot.

The site will also be accessed from Stagecoach, but will be gated.

So this gate would only allow access to the school and emergency department services.

I wanted to briefly show you the grading plan.

This is a little bit better than a concept.

It's more like a preliminary.

But on here, you can recognize these two-foot contour intervals.

As you can see, several of them illustrate the grade change between Stagecoach Road and the Hickory School campus.

There's about 30 feet of grade change.

So this is a pretty significant drop from this parcel to this.

Therefore, this is one of the reasons with the main tenants of why we wanted to consider using the existing entry off of Stagecoach because it allows the ADA accessibility up top.

So here's a bird's eye view of what the courts would look like.

We have three batteries, each fenced in location would have two courts each.

So that provides six courts.

My understanding is that for high school athletics, six courts is the ideal amount because it allows 12 matches to occur back to back, which can get the parents in and out before dinner time, which is really key.

It's one of the driving considerations, excuse me, for why the school would like six courts.

We also want to highlight a little bit about the existing parcel.

So this is a survey we had done, a topographic survey.

You'll see that the existing driveway comes off of Stagecoach.

And you can see that it hugs that property line right along.

It's just right on the edge.

So this is the buffer area that we've talked about quite a bit with Mixragsdale and staff.

And then it ventures down to the existing residence.

Here's a couple of shots of the existing residence.

It was a modest two bedroom, one bathroom slab on grade.

It's served by a private well and subject system.

And the intention is to demolish this structure and replace the utilities with public utilities through the Covenant Schools parcel.

Here's our landscape plan.

You can see that the driveway has now been shifted further south, allowing a buffer area.

This area is 12 feet wide.

That's not 20, and so that's one of the reasons why we wanted to bring this up.

We are proposing magnolia trees along this edge, arborvitae along this, and along the eastern boundary, too, in discussions with this property owner.

These green shapes here, as you'll see all along the boundary, those are existing mature trees.

So we had our surveyor locate every tree six inches in caliper or larger because one of the core goals when we laid this out was to keep as many of those existing trees as possible.

So you see these trees down the bottom.

These are significant oaks.

We really wanted to keep these.

If we were to push this driveway down even further, we don't think we can keep these trees.

So there's there's some trade offs.

We thought that this would be the more appropriate proposal, but.

Here's a section view.

This is a neighbor to the north.

tennis courts to the south.

You can see these magnolias are shown to scale.

This is the size of the tree they intend to plant on day one.

This is not a growth factor.

You can see that the intent is to allow this to grow up over time and hopefully fully screen the neighbors from the activity.

So tennis is an untimed sport.

So the intention is to have these matches between 3.30 and 6 o'clock.

But some of these matches sometimes go long.

And there's about a five-week period on both the end of the fall season and the beginning of the spring season, where daylight savings time does provide an opportunity that some of these matches go right up until the point where it's almost dark.

We're not going to get to everything.

So we just definitely want to make sure that you realize that we're here to answer a lot of questions because we've covered quite a few things.

The USTA recommends 30 foot candles as kind of a minimum.

That's difficult to do in a situation like this, where ideally you'd like to have a 40 foot tall light pole.

That doesn't really fit with the character.

So we looked at, okay, what's the minimum size?

So that's 20 feet tall.

Given the constrictions, this is about the lowest temperature of lighting that we could apply.

So this is going to give you an idea of how warm the light is.

We tried to stay away from all these blue lights and

Here's a rendering of what this would look like.

I can give you a couple of minutes to finish this lighting piece here.

I think it's where a lot of the concerns that you probably have heard thus far.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you for allowing us a couple extra minutes.

So again, ideally you'd like to have 35 to 40 foot tall light standards to light a tennis court.

And the reason is it provides a consistency of light when you have a limitation like this one where we're trying to keep the light poles as low as possible, keep that profile from having glare impacts on the neighbors.

You get a situation where you have a larger undulation, where you have peaks and troughs.

And so this layout is as efficient as we can get it.

If you look at the upper right here, I'm sorry, the upper left, here's kind of a perspective view that shows you where the light standards would be.

and this is as efficient, as least amount as possible with a 20 foot tall pole.

And we've had some discussions about, okay, what does that do to your lighting?

Well, in order to get a minimum of 30, you're gonna have some zones that are closer to 50 and even touching 60.

Now we have talked to some consultants that tell us 75 foot candles is kind of ideal for high school.

So we didn't feel like this was inappropriate.

But the key what we were looking for was making sure that we could get this all within the site so that we had no spillover to the neighbors.

Thank you.

If you could stay there, we'll have some questions for you, I'm sure.

So in your application, one of the things that mentions that you plan to use nutrient credit trading to address stormwater quality, which you're certainly allowed to do, but just as a suggestion, my understanding from speaking to staff is that you're allowed to not just use that one parcel that you've acquired, but also use your existing school campus as well to treat stormwater.

And you have a lot of areas there where you could put in swales and other ways to treat that.

And even if you do purchase nutrient credits, I strongly encourage you to make use of the county's ACAP program and VCAP program to come back and do things on the rest of your campus to address the quality of stormwater.

can be a great educational thing for your students.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

And, you know, I'll share a little bit by myself, I actually worked on this project in the late 90s.

And we actually developed a site plan for the original parcel.

And we did

account for future growth.

And so there are three existing biofilters on the school site.

Now, as you know, the stormwater regulations have changed.

And even though we have a banking system accounted for in our little bean county exercise with the older site plans, the new regulations are telling us that the grandfather effect, that those valuable resources that the school did put in in the late 90s, early 2000s, we can't actually use them.

to offset the impact.

And that doesn't actually mean that they aren't being used.

It just means that we can't use them to justify our calculation.

So in a sense, we're getting double.

I think the county is getting double credit.

The environment's getting double credit.

Not only will the system that's already in place treat this stormwater, but the only way really for us to solve the equation is to purchase the credits also.

Yeah, it does.

I mean I was thinking particularly I believe if you had the math up yet there's a road that went along, like south of that.

And it's course they're going to be.

Yeah, so you have, you could very easily put a vegetative swale before that road, like a linear vegetative swale that could catch storm.

Yeah, right there.

You could very easily put a linear vegetative swale if you wanted to.

Right.

Well, so this system would flow from here, which we will have underground storage for water quantity.

So we are going to solve quantity on site.

The limited, obviously, the topography is limited here.

This system will outfall into an existing pipe system that goes underneath the baseball, underneath the zone you're just referred to, and then off the page.

Just beyond these soccer fields is a very large biofilter.

And we probably have only used about 40% of its total effect, if you will, with what's on site currently.

So that's what I mean by this site will be going through that biofilter and it will be treated.

Thank you for the explanation.

We will discuss that with our landscape architect.

Commissioner Firehock?

Oh, did you have more?

This is maybe less about site plan, but again, one of the things I was thinking about is, is with the considerable investment that goes into the, oh, and also thank you for the presentation and the explanation of the grade, uh, being a cause for still meeting the ADA entrance off of a stagecoach.

Um, now the thing I mentioned earlier too, just, um, uh, thinking about the considerable investment that goes into this kind of thing.

And if there were other tennis organizations or,

locals in the neighborhood that wanted to use the courts and no sort of use assumption that the school would want to open itself up to that kind of use.

But I was just curious if that was a consideration the school was even interested in or if it was just really just solely for the high school program.

So Frank, if I don't answer this to your satisfaction, please jump up and jump in.

So the school has opened it up to the immediate neighbors.

That is the condition and it's actually in the written conditions.

This is really, as Ms.

Firehock already alluded to earlier, in the CAC meeting, there was a lot of resistance to the opportunity of allowing it open to other people.

So there is a comfortability in the school because they're there all the time.

And they control who's there, and they limit the noise, and they can go out there and tell somebody, you're not supposed to be here, you're not supposed to be playing paddle ball at 10-1, right?

I mean, those are all the things they can control.

By opening it up, they do lose some control.

And in a residential setting where we have neighbors and we're trying to be considerate, these lights,

Yeah I understand the

difficulty of turning into like a quasi public park kind of situation.

Thanks for the answer.

Yeah.

So I'll go back to that question about the time of night.

We were all at the CAC meeting.

So I'm just trying to understand.

You don't need it.

Doesn't sound like to me until 10 o'clock at night, even though staff was trying to give you sort of an expansive number.

I don't think 7 p.m.

All right.

So the reason why, I'm sorry.

My understanding is the reason why the six quart layout is the most ideal is because it allows the number of matches that have to occur in a

in an actual match between two schools, not practice.

So you have six matches going on, they finish, six more come on, right?

So if you stack those two, for instance, would be if one of those games went long, two of those games went long, and then they stacked, all of a sudden, if you add a half hour, half hour, I mean, I think you're well within the seven or eight o'clock timeframe.

Now, I don't think that that's gonna happen very often, but they would hate to cut a match off short

in these match environments, especially when you have teams traveling from long distances.

You know, they, they have a footprint of private high schools that travel all around.

And so the school is super excited to be able to finally host matches.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying.

I did receive a letter from a CAC member to again saying that, you know, kids are going to bed and residential homes around that area at a certain time.

So I don't, I don't believe we need 10 o'clock we can discuss what the time is but

I'm not comfortable supporting that generous of a use.

In fact, I think the kids should stop playing tennis well before 10 p.m.

They have homework to do, don't they?

Anyway, I'll leave it at that, but I'm not comfortable with 10 p.m.

Anything else?

No?

Okay.

Yes, thank you.

Thanks, Eric.

Great presentation.

Good to see you.

A couple of questions.

One under, and these are, there's three under the lighting heading.

So lighting controls, do you all have photo sensors or timers on those?

So these fixtures that we're proposing, they have that ability, but that is not the intent.

The intent is to turn these on when they're needed, turn them off when they're done.

So is it possible that someone may forget to turn them off and would a timer at least maybe be helpful?

I'm sure that, yeah, that could be accommodated.

People leave and they forget to turn them off.

Right.

I assume you've, I think actually Ms.

Ragsdale mentioned that you all had reviewed the updated staff conditions.

We did, yes.

Yeah.

We asked for de minimus.

So the county code suggests that 0.5 foot candles at the boundary is code requirement.

My understanding is that that was put in place to protect the de minimis

amount of light that could be coming from anywhere.

I own a light meter myself.

I don't know how many others in the audience can make that claim, but I've walked around with a light meter at night just because this comes up.

It comes up a lot in parking lots and other situations.

It's very hard to find 0.0.

So in our theoretical studies, which is what we do, right?

This is what we put on our plans.

We use software to project how much light will come out.

We think we can do it.

but it's gonna be very, very challenging.

We're gonna have to be very careful with the way we shield these lights and we may actually have to put more screening in in a few areas.

So when we presented you this photometric plan, we discounted the landscape at the boundaries.

I did.

At least the one that I saw in the application was still at half a foot candle.

I mean, there were some areas that were zero, but there were some that were at half a foot candle.

So that's why I'm asking is that the plan that you have in place

and if now you're going to zero, can you still achieve the 30 foot candles on the courts that you need to play the game?

It's brand new.

We haven't routed it.

We think we can.

Theoretically, we think we can.

But I can say if we get down to 0.01, that's not zero.

Okay, thank you.

One last question on lighting.

You guys are using the RSX-1 fixtures.

Okay, right, right.

and so we did have a lighting experts say those were really great fixtures and they're easy to control and they recommend glare shields.

You just said that you want to look at how you address glare and shielding or maybe just said shielding but what are your thoughts on that?

So twofold.

And we're really close.

And so, yes, we understand there is a there is that zone of glare that it can occur from straight verticals in that first 10 degrees.

We think that the screening is going to take care of about 80% of that.

Okay, thanks.

Switching quickly to buffer plantings, staff said, no, no, you said, I think in your presentation that the images shown were to scale.

Yes.

And that your intention is to plant them at that height.

I didn't see anything included in the staff conditions that addressed height.

Yes.

Okay, we're open to that.

I figured you would.

Okay, that was it.

Thank you.

And again, thank you for the presentation.

It was very clear and some things that I didn't quite appreciate the topographical challenges that you have in two directions.

And so a lot of my concerns have been already asked the questions that I have, which I do with lighting.

Are you going to mitigate

that I appreciate all the measurements that you have taken and the calculations.

Also the schedule.

Actually, one of the things that concerns me the most about that is that it seems like

there was a different impression left for the CAC in terms of how long these matches would go.

So it seemed like 5.30 to 6 to then 10 o'clock to me, that's a big jump.

So I appreciate that you already said that nine is, and I guess we'll have more conversations on that up here in the dais, I'm sure.

So what I'm left with is parking and buffer from my concerns.

So

And this is really a comment that maybe you can clarify for me.

The drawing that we have on the screen here shows the path coming from the lower parking lot up and around the back of the courts or the where's your so what is that north northwest side of the courts.

And so that path that wraps around the back, can you show the parking lot back to the parking lot, the upper parking lot?

Yeah.

I'm assuming you're tying into that center court because of the handicap coming into the center court and then they would either go in one direction or the other and there's ramps.

Are those ramps?

These are great questions.

So we're working with an architect who specializes in tennis courts and he suggested 18 inch vertical separation between each battery is the ideal sight line for viewing tennis.

we worked meticulously on the dimensions you see between these courts in order to provide ADA accessibility with ramps, you're correct.

So each of these zones, so this is essentially a level along each face, each North face is level and then it pitches towards the South at 1%.

So this is easy, right?

There's no problem with ADA accessibility through here.

It's the 18 inch climbs between the two batteries

So not only will we want to provide accessibility for anyone to watch a match, not just from the baseline, but we also want to give them the ability to come between the courts, right?

So yes, we have a ramp, a flat area.

another ADA path for at least halfway.

We can't provide an ADA pathway all the way to the end because the grade is dropping from north to south.

So we do have to have a couple of treads of stairs there.

And there's not really enough room to put ramps in this zone.

But we will have ramps, like I said, from each.

So from this flat zone, ramp up, and then it's flat again along this whole face.

The same situation from here to here.

You're ramping down, flat.

And thank you.

I appreciate that, because I figured there were some ramps there, and it was probably a lot more complex that I could see at that scale, certainly with my eyes.

I'm just wondering the angle and the separate path that you're creating with the parking and why can that be combined with the path you're already creating on that northwest side of the course?

Because if you're able to do that, I think you can get more buffer.

If you're able to shift the parking, it's kind of an awkward, I mean, I know that this is probably not final, but it's kind of an awkward situation that you're creating with two paths.

And it seems like actually, if you're in a wheelchair, there's a lot more that you will have to traverse.

You're going to go in one direction, and if you're going back to the other court, then you got to go back up and around.

It seems like if you can combine those paths, the parking access for handicap and the sidewalk that you're creating on the southern side of that, southeast side of that parking with a tennis court, it might provide you the opportunity to create more buffer and move the parking down.

Does that make sense?

No, it does.

Quota concept plan, but this plan actually has been designed almost to its final state in terms of the level of actually engineering calculations we've put into this.

So let me highlight a couple of little things for you.

So this grade from here to here is falling at around five to 6%.

We needed to get this down

to this point and the county has restrictions.

So anywhere you have parking directly adjacent to the drive aisle, you cannot exceed 5% in any direction.

So right there, that's a kind of a limiting factor.

If we had more space right here,

all through here.

We would probably drop this even more.

We would probably make this steeper through here and drop this down.

And then I think we could achieve what you have talked about.

Yeah, you see two sidewalks and you say, why can't they be one?

Well, this is right here.

This is a retaining wall along this edge.

So this is a small knee wall.

Right here.

I'm sorry.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Let me put the pointer back on.

So that one path has a double line.

The other two don't.

That's a knee wall.

So it's about perfect height for someone to sit and watch.

But that's the grade change difference between this battery and this set of parking.

We would have liked to have done just what you described.

We played with this quite a bit, like I said.

This grade, so just going back to, this is a retaining wall, so we would love to get this retaining wall less tight.

I guess what, I mean, you're already going through your retaining walls and I would think that there's a way of trying to create more buffer than that minimum, what is it, 15 feet that you're creating 12 feet, so even less.

It seems like, I know that there's some topographical challenges, but you're already doing retaining walls and both for the access for handicap

So we've looked at it quite a bit and we were happy to keep discussing it.

So just to be clear, this section through here, we can give the buffer.

It's only where our road driveway comes down.

And so this is something that we had site meetings with the fire marshal's office.

This design was not only the most efficient in terms of getting down, but it's also the exact orientation and length that the fire marshal was comfortable with.

And so it's gonna be difficult for us to shorten the driveway.

But if we were to say, so if you look a little closer right at the pinch point,

you see that we barely got enough room to get a minimum width drive aisle through the existing parcel.

And one of the reasons why the parcel is what it is, is because of its history.

In the old days, Stagecoach Road went right through here.

So this was the road.

That's why the existing driveway is right on the northern boundary line.

Because this was the old Stagecoach Road.

This went all the way to Lynchburg.

But in the 1950s, it was moved to here.

And what's the dimension of your drive out now?

It's the minimum width 20 feet.

Do you have that 20?

It's 20 feet, yes.

Well, I do.

I mean, I do appreciate what you're what you're dealing with here and how you're trying to to navigate it.

Understood.

And that's one of the reasons why they're, you know, we suggested let's put some something substantial in, you know, you could have

with maybe some smaller, younger pieces of vegetation.

Or we could come in and say, hey, let's put the biggest magnolia.

It's going to be evergreen.

It's going to stay screened all year.

As they grow, then the tree roots are going to be underneath that road that you're going to be driving over.

So it creates a difficult situation for them.

I do.

This is more interesting.

Could you speak to a little bit about, so I'm going to just go to a little macro issue here.

If you could speak a little bit to what's the sports fields, which are there, which is, could you just talk to me, how are they lit if they are lit during the, during the year?

Or is this the only field?

This would be the only facility.

So the football field is not lit.

That's correct.

The baseball field is not lit.

Correct.

The other football field, soccer field is not lit.

That's correct.

Okay, so help me understand why this one has to be lit in those other stones, because we still play football here late in the afternoon.

We play both footballs here at this late in the afternoon, both the American one and the non-American one.

Well, okay, in an ideal world.

I'm not talking about tennis.

I'm leaving the tennis thing alone.

My colleagues have certainly pushed the line.

I'm wondering why this is the only field

of which I would assume in your program, it's the one that's probably got the least amount of people showing up for it.

Certainly if I look at your website, not your website, if I look at your website and see this kind of activities that you proclaim and the kinds of awards which you've won, this tennis is not the one which I would say would be driving your sports activities, your football team, certainly your basketball team, which is not being considered here, and some of your sort of ground sports, what I'm going to say, ground sports.

Those are the ones where you have a lot of energy according to your website.

Now I can do this where it's going to your website and so I wanted to know well since there's all this stuff around the website why isn't why aren't those lit or are those lit I don't know since I'm not on that side of town and if they're not lit what is this special since all of those all of those activities the football games are Friday night football I assume you're playing Friday night football here Friday after oh Friday afternoon football okay Friday afternoon football

soccer, the other football, and then baseball, because baseball tends, unless you're playing afternoon baseball, all of those tend to have the same kinds of elements about them, early afternoon activities that may drive into the early evening.

And so I'm just trying to figure out if it was okay not to light those, why are we being driven to light these?

Right.

So two good questions.

So my understanding is that the tennis battery situation requires matches to occur stacked.

So a football game is one game.

You have one field, one game.

Soccer team comes, they play one game and they're done.

With tennis in this arrangement, unless you had 12 courts, you have to stack them.

You have to have basically two games back to back.

And that's why it takes longer than say some of these other sports.

Gotcha.

So if we're looking at stack to stack, because when I look at the rest of the courts around town, you're right.

I don't have a problem with the number of courts.

I thought I would.

But you're right in amongst the high school courts around town.

So I don't have an issue with that.

lighting all your athletic fields.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

I didn't answer that question.

So when we originally had our pre-application meeting with the county, we came in assuming that we would do one special permit for the new parcel they purchased.

Right.

But because we're interconnecting the two uses with the shared use path and shared parking agreement that we're pursuing at the site plan level, then that, according to Sarah, I'm sorry, Rebecca, correct me if I'm wrong.

That's what forced us to go to a rezoning for the entire school and folding this parcel into the school.

So what we're doing is we're giving you a special permit for everything, all sports, everything on the school parcel and the new parcel.

So by special permit, this is the only one that's going to be allowed.

You have to come back for that.

Okay.

That's what I wanted to hear.

And then the other piece that some of us, you know, or at least I spoke to, um, is, is you, at one point, the school owned both of those pieces of property.

You own the property that you're, that you're dealing with according to tax records and you own the pieces that was above it.

And you sold the piece of the other piece.

I'm struggling with, or I guess I'm pondering.

And I'm not trying to do your site plan, but I'm pondering if you just share a little bit about why there.

If you could just share a little bit about why there.

How did you get to that place?

Because you've got a lot of green property over there.

You owned a bunch of property.

The school owned property prior to settling on this piece.

Right.

So I've learned a lot about tenants in the last year as well.

I play recreationally, but I didn't really understand fully

All the components and one of the big components is sun angle and rising in the east, setting in the west.

The ideal alignment is somewhere close to what we've got shown on this plan.

So you can see the three batteries fits almost ideally within this parcel.

And did they have a conversation with the, do you know what the engagement's been with the four different houses, the four other houses which are sort of around there?

So you've had deep conversations with all of them?

Several, yes.

Yeah, we alerted them before we ever submitted.

We showed them concept plans.

Okay, sure, I'm good for now.

The beauty about going to last, a lot of my questions have been asked, but I do have a couple.

One's a follow up to Commissioner Bivins and knowing that the tennis matches are stacked, is there something that prevents them from starting earlier besides children missing a few hours of school?

In college, you miss days of school when you play sports.

Yeah, Eric's correct.

With the matches that take place, school ends about 3.30, 3.40.

We want to try to do all of our, you were asking about football and baseball.

We try to start everything around four o'clock when it matches.

Practices might start a little bit more, but Eric is correct with tennis in order to complete a high school match.

And it's really about matches, not about practice.

We would have maybe eight home matches a year, eight to 10 home matches in a season.

Girls are in the fall, boys are in the spring.

They're stacked.

We would start matches at four o'clock.

For us, we're right there, which is actually going to be helpful because we now have to travel to courts.

And courts are becoming more difficult to rent because a lot of courts are being converted to pickleball.

And we can't get courts.

It's been very challenging.

But another factor, and somebody had mentioned this, as I think Eric did, is that there are schools traveling from

Virginia Beach, Richmond, Northern Virginia, Roanoke, Lynchburg.

So it takes a while to get there.

They're definitely leaving school early to get there.

So the matches really across the VISTA are athletic conferences.

Matches start at four o'clock.

You play a pro set of eight games.

A match will take 60 to 75 minutes.

Maybe it can go a little longer.

You have to stack them.

You play six singles.

first, and then you go to doubles.

So it's actually three matches, three doubles matches that play right after the singles.

So if you stack those, typically the match will run till about 6.30.

Where we run into an issue is, as Eric mentioned, is daylight savings time.

Since it's not timed, it's about a five week period.

And right at the end of October, early November with the girls tennis where

We don't want to get into a match and then have to stop at dark, particularly the girls here in playoffs at that point.

And we were required to finish matches by VISTA standards for the playoffs.

The boys, it's really beginning of the season.

right at the end of February and into March, early March.

I think March 10th is when Daylight Savings will kick in in 2024.

I looked that up earlier today.

So it's about a three-week period there where we want to make sure that we can finish matches.

And Commissioner Firehock agreed.

We want the kids to go home.

That's why we were talking about it earlier when Rebecca was emailing us.

earlier today and saying, hey, we can back that down to nine.

We just want to make sure that we can meet that, you know, match goes longer at seven.

Maybe one of the students is having trouble with a serve, the coach wants to stay around and hit a few serves.

So that's a very helpful explanation, but let's make sure I'm clear with my understanding.

You have to start at four.

Well, if we start at three, then we're pulling our opponents away from school much earlier.

So the guidance, the guidance is not a rule that you have to do it, but we all, all the athletic directors agree and we want to start it.

at four o'clock.

I'm still trying to get a handle on how many matches there are.

Yeah, let's say 20.

I didn't go and count.

I don't want to be cautious.

but I think it's eight to 10 home matches and then we travel for the other matches.

The only thing that could change that is with playoffs but typically once we get to playoffs, we're going to Richmond, we're going to central facilities that all the schools can travel to.

To me, the whole concern about the lighting being on later

It's only happening when the matches are happening.

So therefore, if we put a limit of some type, 20 matches a year, 30, some number that would assure us that even though there are impacts of light spillage and maybe noise and somebody's playing tennis till nine at night, it's not that usual.

that it's an unusual situation.

And that's accurate.

It's an unusual situation.

We just want to make sure in those crossover periods when we're having matches

Right.

If it's not that often per year, if it's, I don't know what you said, 20 days a year, I don't really have a problem with that particularly.

I'm still wrestling with just the impact of just generally having tennis going on in what is essentially a couple of people's backyards.

because you do, by having that residential lot now turn into tennis facilities, you are now abutting two landowners who were not abutting a sports field before.

And I'm also curious if you feel comfortable characterizing whether you think the residents who, all those homeowners that you said you spoke to, we didn't really hear what

what their reactions were.

I mean, I know what I heard at the CAC.

Yeah, as far as we met from the very beginning, once Ms.

Morris, she passed away and we purchased the property from her heir.

The first thing we did before we did anything was we went and talked to the neighbors, the Brays, the Bickers, and the Crawfords, and just explained to them what we were doing, what we would like to do, and they were involved.

We've met with each of the, the Brays we met with three times, and the Bickers and the Crawfords we met with six times, just to, every step of the way, that was my commitment to them personally, that we're gonna involve you every step of the way.

talked through the pros and cons, the issues, listened to you, and much of what we've done was based on their input.

So the more we finished with them, that they were comfortable with what they saw, but as far as their support, I don't know if that would be appropriate for me to say, but I must say it's a very positive relationship with all three.

I had a couple of more questions before we move on.

I wanted to want you to talk a little bit about the amount of spectators.

Sure, I've been to, I think it was maybe Commissioner Bivins, Bivins.

keep rolling.

But yeah, I've been to probably over the last four or five years, really the last four years to probably half a dozen of our matches.

They're lightly attended.

It's pretty much local parents and a few grandparents.

And that's it maybe maybe

10, maybe 8, maybe 12.

It's not a lot.

It's not the most highly attended of the events.

It's still important.

It's very important to us.

You don't see really away parents travel much.

Maybe you'll see two or three there.

One final question is regarding condition six, I think I typed it up correctly.

It says tennis courts must not be used by other tennis organizations.

We run

We have a long history partnership with Southwood.

Every summer we run a soccer camp and bring the kids over.

The courts are utilized for school activities.

There may be a time in the summer where we do a daytime camp or clinic or something of that nature.

We haven't done that before because we've never had those facilities.

and I think Commissioner Moore was asking about opening it up.

That was really opening up to the public was a direct response to the neighbors, the immediate neighbors, the Brays, the Bickers, and the Crawford's after the community advisory meeting.

There was concern about you know it being put up on the Charlottesville USTA site that hey there's these great new courts of covenant

try them out.

They're wonderful and we were very concerned about traffic coming and going outside of school hours when we're not there and really not having control.

And that was really out of respect to the neighbors.

But there may be times when we haven't done that before because we didn't have facilities.

So that certainly can be a possibility.

We've done that before with

It does.

So the last question I had is we talked a lot about the lighting on the courts.

Is there other lighting on the site at all?

This site plan?

Yes, we are proposing one

It is on there.

Okay.

I missed that.

I'm sorry.

Got it.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

So we're going to finish the public hearing and then we'll take a five minute break.

Um, I have one person has signed up here in person.

Forgive me if I mispronounced the name, Harold Timoney.

So tell me, would you like to come forth for your comment?

Yeah, I'm Harold Timoney.

I live at 480 Stagecoach Road, which is across the street in one lot to the north and east.

And I overlooked the county parking lot, the police parking lot, which by the way, is very quiet because the county police weren't allowed to use their sirens

in that residential area.

And I was surprised that this is not a rezoning request.

And it turns out that private school athletic facilities by code are allowed by special use permit.

and I would like you to reject that.

And the reason is, the main reason is the elephant in the room, noise.

Mr. Wooley cites in the application that tennis creates 58 decibels of sound.

That refers to the noise of the ball on the racket.

but it doesn't include the reaction of the players, the grunts, when they serve, or the reaction of the onlookers, which according to the internet, goes up to 120 decibels.

So I'm concerned that at this point,

Whatever time in the morning, certainly it shouldn't be allowed to 7 a.m.

They don't need it.

It's ridiculous to think that people would be out there playing at 7 o'clock in the morning.

And at night, it seems to me 8 o'clock might be reasonable, but certainly not past that.

Most people are getting ready for bed at that time.

So I think that there should be some restrictions, not only in terms of hours, but of noise.

I mean, what levels should be allowed?

And it turns out that noise from athletic facilities are exempt from the county code.

That's according to the strike now.

And I was surprised at that.

This is not a good use for a residential property.

This is R2.

This should be houses, people, not extraordinary noise.

And I asked each of you to think, how would you like to have a tennis court next to your house?

You think that would be enjoyable?

You think it would affect the value?

Also, I'm wondering how the rules would be enforced.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else in the public that's here before us in person that would like to speak that has not signed up?

Present.

No, sir, there isn't.

With that, I'll turn it back over to African if you want to make a response to what you've heard.

OK, with that, I'll close the public hearing.

And with that, we'll also take a seven minute recess.

And so we'll report back here at

813, 814.

And we'll bring it back into the commission.

Listen to the conversation.

I've jotted down a couple of topics for us to talk through and we can always add more.

I have the timing as one, so the timing that's in the staff report is one of the conditions.

Of course, lighting, we spent a lot of time talking about that.

Buffer, and I think noise also has a place in that as well.

So those are the kind of three buckets that I've kind of heard similar to the top.

Oh, and the staff report, I believe the condition is from 10 p.m.

to 7 a.m.

Yes.

And perhaps we can start there.

I know some intel that we received from the applicant, they're willing to go down to nine, but I'd like for us to tell what we think would be most appropriate in light of the design conditions that we see before us.

So with that, I'll open up the floor.

Yeah, I can't imagine later than 8 or 8.30.

I mean, you're talking about like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

It's like a four hour.

Any other thoughts?

I would just also say that with the neighbors that are around, maybe different neighbors that come in over time, we don't know who will have children and who will not as well.

For me, I'm kind of keeping that in mind as I'm deliberating on what is the appropriate time limit.

It doesn't feel like 10 o'clock to me.

On that note, I have received.

We did talk about the CAC again last week too, or this week.

I went over where we met last, a week ago.

And the members of the CAC expressed the same concerns as they had before.

They don't want it lit at all.

I would be comfortable with something like 8 a.m.

to 8 p.m.

as a window for that space to be lit.

I think four hours is long enough.

If you want to go to 830, I'm okay with that.

But we also received another letter from a CAC member that today, I think it was this morning, that said

that they have small children and they usually put them to bed between 8 and 8.30.

So that was some of the justification for why they don't want matches.

And there's cars coming and going and people packing up.

And it's not just the game itself.

Just a couple of thoughts.

I'm sympathetic to the points you're making.

the two of my two colleagues.

One thing that really resonated with me and I've been around tennis my whole life and also learned a lot recently about lighting of tennis courts.

And what I have come to realize is that maybe this is just a sort of underscoring what the applicant said.

that the real issue are the shoulder seasons, right?

It's really late fall and early spring.

So we're not talking necessarily about 12 months.

We're talking about maybe a month at either end where there's daylight savings time issues.

Other than that, I really feel like the lighting is gonna be minimal.

The need for lighting is gonna be minimal.

but I'm also sympathetic to those occasional matches that are very rare where they do push over and there's really not a way for you to say, gosh, it's eight o'clock, we have to call this match and end it.

So it's rare, it's super rare.

If this was like a municipal court where there were people playing and signing up right up to the last minute, I'd say that's a concern.

My sense is that it's not gonna be like that.

What I would say though is

that I would absolutely put in the conditions the need to add timers to the lights so that if there's no one there, they shut off.

And I would actually add those light sensors to the two light fixtures in the parking area.

so that when you drive in, they come on if there's someone there.

Otherwise, they're off as well.

Just thinking about how to manage that.

I think 9 o'clock is reasonable.

I mean, if we don't want to go with 10, I would say 9 o'clock's reasonable.

It gives a little bit of a buffer to the timeline for the school.

And I think, again, it's probably going to be, I don't know if there'll ever be a time where the lights are on that late.

I feel like we're, that's a great segue.

So it sounds like we're in that between eight and nine o'clock range.

Let's talk a little bit about the lighting a little more.

I thought Commissioner Bivins brought up a good question.

There are no other fields that are lit, so what brings attention to this?

I think that's one side to it.

I think the second side to it is, how do we even feel, like if there are lights, about the condition that's been placed in the staff report that says there's no spillover technically, right?

That's the minimalist kind of,

Language in there that says, cut off at the boundary, right?

So there's two points there.

Love Force has some discussion on the, maybe try to bring this home.

So.

I would support the term de minimis.

I would support zero.

It is next impossible.

I don't have a problem with de minimis.

So many of you know where I live.

And so I live in a place that's got every single sports activity that could take place every moment except for maybe the hottest days in the summer.

And so I appreciate the

But you knew that when you lived there?

Did not know?

and anybody who's living near a school that's been there for a good amount of years now.

And I do appreciate that.

So I do think that the de minimis, I support the de minimis and I also support nine o'clock because I also recognize this is not going to be every single day.

This is going to be the odd days out.

It's not going to be, and I find it interesting because it's not going to be like the football field, which every Friday night, at least where I live,

There are bright lights.

There is lots of joyful noise.

And it's just part of Friday nights, you know, Friday nights in a small town, excuse me, in a small community.

And so I'm okay with that because I also know, and this is what I was making my point about, while they have an emerging tennis team, tennis operation, it is nothing like the rest of their sports teams.

There's nothing like it.

And while they may hope that it's going to be one of their breakout programs,

The reality is I don't believe it's going to happen because if we look at the rest of it, I wouldn't look at the rest of the courts.

And so a lot of the other high schools have something like, you know, seven courts, eight courts, four courts.

The one entity that has all the courts is, of course, the Bores Head Inn because of its nexus to the university and it's got the stadium seating there.

But other than that, the number of courts, while I was concerned at first, I'm not as concerned with the number of courts now because I also believe that it's going to be one of their, I don't think it's going to be pushed in the way that I think other parts of that property is going to be pushed.

Soccer.

If you go there on an afternoon, you see lots of people trying to play soccer or training for soccer.

And the same thing with football and the same thing with basketball, both not football for women, but both of those other sports with male, female components.

So I like nine o'clock.

I like, I like the minimus.

You know, as I mentioned before, I would have liked to seen it someplace else, but it's not someplace else.

So I'm not going to, not my role.

That's definitely fair.

The other note I had was to add a condition about tree height.

Also, Chair, Commissioner Carrazano, I think made a really good point about as the trees mature,

particularly if they're that close to the road, what's the impact on their lifespan?

And I know Commissioner Firehock talks about this often about trees planting and how do you do that so you maximize their survival.

And while magnolias are wonderful trees, they are not, they're not easy to get to 50 to 100 feet.

It takes them a good 20 years to get to that height.

And so while they're wonderful southern beauties, it's going to be a while before they provide the kind of buffering.

And so I would hope that the applicant would look at different ways of doing effective buffering.

Maybe it's with wooden fences and maybe it's with other trees that can be suggested by staff.

On the way in?

Well, first of all, no magnolia grandiflora is needed in Virginia, but that being aside, your point is well taken.

There's also a trade-off.

Correct.

And it also will, you know, if you plant a tiny tree and a large tree at the same time, eventually that stress is so great that the small tree will outgrow the larger tree.

So

So while it seems like planting a larger tree gets you something, it doesn't get you as much as you might think it does.

I mean, I would say that if anything, like the green giant arbovita, I've seen those things, they sprout up, they serve instant satisfaction, you get your screening.

But then eventually they kind of die and they fall over and they do

Yeah, you might consider a layered buffer.

Get some bushy stuff to get started and smaller trees that have more likelihood that they will survive to adulthood and thrive.

Because if you take a tree that's been in pots with its roots bound, it's not going to do well.

That's the point that I was trying to get to with my questioning about the parking and the access, because it just seemed like, but I understand why they're getting there, given the topographical challenges.

But it's that 12 foot, if you, one, we're asking to reduce the 20 to 12, right?

So that's part of what being asked in front of us here.

It's minimal.

And to try to get any kind of layered buffering,

unless they make some agreement of planting on the neighbor's property.

But I guess that's, you know, I guess that's not up to us.

I mean, at least on the part that's not by the parking lot, you could definitely do more layering than it showed on that.

There is, but I think what we're missing is the topography and that's why they're putting the retaining wall.

Well, the more vegetation that they were able to put on site, even on slope, the more sound attenuation they're going to get.

That's just a fact.

I think it's a really good point that there is a lot of trees are coming down and what it's also opening up is opening up noise from the other sports because right now there is a buffer there and that property, that property serves as a buffer.

and we're losing that buffer with these courts.

With the topography provided buffer though, I mean it raises 30 feet or so, right?

I'll add my thoughts to this too.

You know, one of the things the applicant did mention was maybe the buffer once you extend past the parking area, that they could they could build that up a little bit more, they could do some layered parking or layered buffer in that area.

And if you look on the flip side, I don't know if this would work, but you look on the what is that the planned south side of the entrance road,

before you get to the parking, there's a larger section right in there that you can potentially plant up.

So, depending on what you're actually buffering from, which is probably a little bit of everything, you could buffer from the courts there, you could buffer.

So, there's really the stretch of the actual parking spaces that's the smaller buffer.

The other thing is, I don't know if I can, maybe just a nod of the head, are you all putting windscreens on these courts?

So the windscreens are gonna help with the radiant light too off the courts.

Windscreens, they go on the chain link that help.

It's a big green, usually it's green, screen that's like a mesh, a really tight mesh that prevents wind from affecting the ball play.

That's what helps with sound.

The commissioners, where are we?

One other addition I want to mention real quick, and this is just to get back to the condition number six with use of the tennis courts being limited to school activities.

I just want to make sure that when it comes to access that the school would like to provide, say summer camps in partnership with Southwood Kids or other summer camps, that that is

When it's proper timing, I did want to run through and clarify the intent of the conditions, but it's not intended to prevent the school itself from hosting tennis camps or clinics and that sort of thing.

I do have one question for everybody.

I thought the gentleman in the front row, next to the front row, brought up a good point.

If this is open to three adjacent properties by invitation of the school, who will police whether or not they're turning the lights off at a certain time and that they're obeying the rules?

But we do know that the lights are going to go off if we can say somewhere between 8 and 9, 8 and 9 at some point.

So at some point, there just won't be any more lights.

Yeah.

And so that's true.

That's true.

And if the houses are close enough, I would hope maybe that it's not my business, but I would hope that people would walk over to play tennis so they wouldn't have to mess with the ballads or anything like that.

And so really what I, what I, what I saw that was is like for the three houses, which are there.

And again, remember,

This is an offer of which only one may use it, as opposed to all three of them using it.

But for them, it's like, sure, you can please come, but we're not going to extend the lights just because you're my neighbor.

And theoretically, the lights wouldn't come on because there's no match.

So when the sun were to go down,

That's good.

It feels like we're kind of rallying around a yes, but there's certainly some conditions as yes and, and I'll just kind of recap my notes and you all can tell me if I'm incorrect.

And Commissioner Missel, will you be making a motion?

Yeah, I'm writing down some conditions.

Okay.

So going back to the time, we have the end time.

Let's say we've fluctuated between eight and nine.

It feels like there's consensus around nine.

I don't see why it needs to go to 9.

I'll say 8.30 for the sake of this.

How about in the morning?

We never touched on that, and I thought there was some reservation around 7 a.m.

I don't know.

You know, remember,

Those of us who played sports, remember in order to play sports, particularly I think this is high school here, you either had to come in early or you stayed late.

And this is a small group of people.

This is not going to be 100.

This is not going to be 100 folks who are going to be doing this.

I mean, so I don't disagree.

I remember high school, no one wanted to play sports at eight.

I don't know what high school you went to, but there was no sport playing.

So 7 to 830 is what I'm hearing at the moment.

In terms of the timing, I'm less inclined to go down to 830 just because, again, this isn't happening every weekend or every, you know, once a week.

that they're going to go to that 9 o'clock time.

But it does give that flexibility for that one match that just goes on and not have to say, OK, now it's 8.30, we're shutting them off.

And beyond 8.30, the reality is, and Mr. Missel brought this up, is that you also need safe passage back to those cars.

You have ramps.

There are steps and ramps and a number of, so we're going to need lighting when people are leaving.

And I think that's probably true 99% of the time, but what about that one or two games that might go over?

Only on one.

Were we clear on that?

I'm just curious.

I don't understand that they would be turning, like the coaches there, like let's say they're done at 730, then they're going to turn it off.

Or are they going to wait for a timer that's just sitting there going and turning itself off at nine?

Because there are sports fields in our county that are lit up and there's no game going on.

They're just sitting there lit up.

I don't know if we can say that the timer

Yeah, that's what I'm hoping.

That might be getting into the weeds.

I'm inclined toward nine as well as Christian Carrazana.

The applicant was very comfortable with that.

A number of us have said nine.

It's a nice clean time.