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HomeMy WebLinkAbout6/10/2020 Item 2, Kean Wilbanks, Megan From:Andrew Kean < To:Advisory Bodies Cc:Bell, Kyle Subject:Public comments for Planning Commission, Item 2, 487 Leff St. Attachments:487LeffCommentsKean.pdf; 487LeffCommentsKean.docx To Whom It May Concern- Attached to this email are my comments for the upcoming Planning Commission meeting, Item 2, 487 Leff St. I have attached the same comments in both PDF and MS Word formats. Please let me know if you have any difficulty viewing my comments. Thank you for your time. Andrew Kean 1 June 9, 2020 Planning Commission of the City of San Luis Obispo Dear Commissioners- My name is Andrew Kean and my family and I live at 377 High St. Our home is in very close proximity to the project at 487 Leff St (Item 2 on your Agenda). First of all, I wanted to thank HASLO and RRM for all of the thoughtful work they have put into this project. It is a difficult task to integrate a large office building into a residential neighborhood, but it is clear they have done a very good job. In particular, my family and I are most excited about the change of Leff into a 1-way street for one block. Being a little selfish, this will make living in our home a much safer enterprise. My wife has to back our vehicle into traffic onto the relatively busy/fast High St. But her effort is made more difficult by cars which treat the right turn from Leff onto High (westbound) as a merge, when it is a stop sign. Amazingly, these cars frequently honk at my wife for being in their way, when they only just appeared after flying around the corner. Not having cars traveling westbound on Leff at High will be a huge improvement for us, and I suspect for many of my neighbors. The alignment between Leff and Harris will also make it easier/safer for cars to head from Harris towards Downtown. So thank you for including this in your project. My only real concern with the project at this point is the large amount of signage in a residential neighborhood, and in particular on High St. In reading the PC agenda packet, it seems that legally they are allowed to have 20 sf of signage total for the building. I understand their logic that they have a 3-sided building, so maybe they should have additional signage. But a request from 20 sf to 77.5 sf (almost a 4X multiplier) of signage seems excessive. In particular, on High St., they are requesting over 60 sf of signage, which is way too much for a residential neighborhood. I would understand a modest exception, but putting triple the legal amount on a single side of the building isn’t vaguely close to following the rules. To be clear, they are asking for 47 lineal feet of signs facing just High St, one of which reaches 25’ above ground level. The typical lot in my neighborhood is 50 feet wide and has a single story home. To claim their signage is in scale with the neighborhood is wrong. I will be honest that I don’t fully understand their reasoning in their request for an exception, but it seemed to mostly depend on the fact that their office building is large and a superior design. Personally, I don’t think that having a very large building in a residential neighborhood should then trigger an exception for a very large sign. This logic seems flawed. To fit into a residential neighborhood better, a large office building should be required a small sign (or at least not 4X the legal amount). Section 15.40.610 of the SLO Municipal Code requires that three separate findings are all required to make at exception to the sign regulations. The developer fails to show what “unusual circumstances” justify the exception other than saying the building has three street frontages. Part A of 15.40.610 requires that the unusual circumstances will make adherence to the regulations are impractical or infeasible. This doesn’t apply to the proposal at 487 Leff as it is totally practical and feasible to for the new building to follow the rules. Part C of this same section requires that the signage not be excessively sized compared to the surroundings and not be inconsistent with the surroundings. There are hardly any 20 feet tall buildings in my neighborhood, let alone 20 foot tall signs reaching 25 feet into the air. The developer does not provide any justification of how the signage on High St. is appropriately sized given the neighborhood. It is pretty clear to me that the proposed signage on High St. does not meet both part A and part C of 15.40.610, and is nowhere close to satisfying all three separate findings. Furthermore, I find it odd that the developer has chosen to add a large yellow tree in front of the proposed 20’ tall sign with 28” tall letters reaching 25’ into the air (for instance, their building pictures on Packet Page 40, 54, and many others). It comes across as if they are trying to hide the true magnitude of the vertical sign. It seems highly unlikely a tree will be planted to obscure the signage in real life. If a sign is so large that it requires a tree to reduce its visibility to the neighbors, simply go with a smaller sign. A large building triggering a large sign triggering a large tree to obscure the large sign doesn’t seem logical to me. HASLO does uniquely wonderful things for our community (and we very much appreciate having them as neighbors), but this is a building which people actively seek out as their destination. Nobody driving by is going to see the huge signs and suddenly decide they need to pull over to stop at HASLO. Signage is basically public advertising and this is not an organization which relies on public advertising towards drivers on High St. It is not like a sandwich shop, of which there are probably 40 of the same business in town, possibly justifying large signage. Obviously, they must disagree with my opinion, but significant downsides exist of installing a sign so out of scale with the neighborhood. On the other hand, the upsides/benefits of such a sign are few and far between. I have just one last comment, which I don’t think has much consequence one way or another. In case it matters, at least one and possibly two of the public parking spaces identified on the Architectural Site Plan (Packet Page 44) cannot exist as proposed. The most westerly proposed parking spaces (left side of the picture) block the driveway of my neighbor. You can somewhat make out their “blocked” driveway in the upper left corner of that Site Plan. Thank you for your time and consideration of my comments. Andrew Kean 377 High St. San Luis Obispo, CA 93401