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Home My WebLink About9/20/2022 Item 6a, Lucas Monterey Street, ¨³¤¬ Ε Ǿ on your Tuesday September 20 agenda. There is much to like about the proposal. It offers an attractive gathering place for students, locals, and tourists with indoor and outdoor recreational activities. It would give San Luis something of what makes foreign towns seem so vibrant, human, and welcoming to locals as well to visitors. That the developers propose to repurpose much of what is already there is another attractive feature. My ultimate hope is that the project will come to fruition. As the project stands, it is in compliance with applicable city-wide rules. However, there are some issues about compliance with Ordinance 1651, an overlay that imposes conditions over and above basic city code, and these need to be addressed. Ordinance 1651 came about to protect the San Luis Drive neighborhood, located across San Luis Creek from the project. Our area is a closely knit community of families in about 175 residences spread out along a gradually rising landscape. This community is the only R1 residential zoned area in town that abuts directly to a CT/S Tourist/Commercial zoned areaupper Monterey Street. Because of potential conflicts that could arise between the two areas, the citizens of the neighborhood banded together over thirty years ago to develop an ordinance that specified certain additional conditions to ensure that future development would preserve the tranquility of the neighborhood. When the ordinance was drafted and promulgated in 1991, its proponents envisioned a series of developments on upper Monterey Street that would follow in the train of the Apple Farm and the Peach Tree Inn. Thus, the current Ordinance, 1651, reads more like a guide to tweaking hotel construction than as a general guide to peaceful cohabitation. Thus, most of its design principles govern construction rather than outdoor spaces. However, buried in these principles are ideas that apply equally well to outdoor uses. I will touch on some of these design elements of the Ordinance 1651 to create a bigger picture and suggest how ones that at first glance d the applicants are to be applauded for repurposing the existing building and environs rather than demolishing everything and starting all over again from scratch. But even though there is no new construction, ³§¤ ±¤²´«³ ¶¨«« ¢«¤ ±«¸ ¡¤ ¤¶ ´²¤a major shift from an outdoor garden retail shop that saw maybe 15 potential customers a day to a bar tavern restaurant outdoor recreation area retail shop brewery axe throwing pickle ball court complex operating from 7 am to 10 pm that could easily see more people in any single day than Daylight Gardens saw in a month. And the people coming to the new site will not be quietly pondering the merits of spending $2,000 for a hammock. Rather they will arrive with the purpose of having lots of fun, some of it boisterous, for less than twenty bucks. The traffic levels will be significantly different, and the character of the interaction vastly different. Criterion 2 of the Ordinance prohibits balconies and their doors facing the creek. Now on its face, this guideline does not seem to apply because the applicant proposes no balconies. But it is important to consider why that rule was developed in the first place. Balconies were proscribed because by their nature, they invite guests from the inside their rooms to the outside, where such gatherings can get boisterous (imagine Cal Poly students renting a room on a football weekend or a family hanging out there for a graduation celebration). The noise that could emanate was considered enough of a problem that the City, in its revision of the Ordinance four years ago, ¥®±¡ £¤ ®¯¤ ¡ «¢®¨¤² ¥ ¢¨¦ ³§¤ ¢±¤¤ª «³®¦¤³§¤±. Comparing that situation to what The Hub proposes, we see the potential for a lot more than occasional noise, something that could be likened to the noise of maybe 50 balconies, open and occupied for hours-long periods rather than just for a mere twenty or thirty minutes before a football game or a graduation exercise at Cal Poly. So we can infer that the design principle has serious implications for the noise-generating potential at The Hub. Criterion 7 is even more to the point as it singles out noise-generating uses and identifies parking and ¢³¨µ¤ ®´³£®®± ±¤¢±¤ ³¨® ´²¤², for example, gathering areas. It says that noise-generating uses should be located on the interior of the site, buffered by buildings, such as what happens in a courtyard where sound is confined and bounces back and forth until it finally diminishes among the inner walls. There are several good examples already on this part of Monterey Street within a few blocks: the Quality Suites (immediately next to the Hub), the La Quinta, the Mission Inn, the Peach Tree Inn and the Apple Farm Inn. But with The Hub, the main buildingindeed the only buildingis in the dead center of the lot, £ ³§¤ ¢³¨µ¤ ±¤¢±¤ ³¨® ±¤ ² ²´±±®´£ ¨³ «¨ª¤ §®±²¤²§®¤, exactly the inverse of what the Ordinance envisions. Further, the Ordinance pictured buildings with only incidental outdoor uses on the lot. In the five examples above, for instance, the ratio outdoor usage to indoor space is about 1 to 10. But the Hub proposes an amount of square footage outside that is in effect equal to the amount insideboth have about 12,000 square feet, or a one-to-one ratio. Furthermore, only two (also the smallest) of the five outdoor recreation areas are located where the building fully acts as a buffer. Zone E depends mainly on the curr on a six foot fence. At a minimum, this new fence for Zone A should be compatible with the current one for Zone E, and should be at least 8 feet high Criterion 15 says that ¨ ¸ ²³±´¢³´±¤, ®¤ ®¥ ³§¤ ±®®¬² ¥ ¢¨¦ ¢±¤¤ª²¨£¤ ²§ «« ¡¤ ´²¤£ ¯±¨¬ ±¨«¸ ¥®± ²®¢¨ « ¦ ³§¤±¨¦²Ǿ ²´¢§ ² ¡ ««±®®¬ȁ Oddly, the Hub has ®«¸ one indoor room creekside. It is also a very large one, and it is the location dedicated to indoor amplified live music four afternoons and evenings a week. That use is incompatible with the applicable 1651 criterion. And even if it were, the wall facing the creek is almost 50 percent windows with single pane glass. Anything that would function as an additional baffle, such as heavy drapes, that helps attenuate the sound of an amplified concert, would be superior to a series of phone calls complaining about noise. If the music is worth listening to, closing the ugh. Criterion 16 says that openings resulting from ground parking oriented toward the creek (of which there are many) shall be prohibited. The applicant proposes to leave all surface But a complex that by its very nature funnels hundreds of people and their cars, in and out, from 7 in the morning until after 10 at night, is a substantially new use that has to be recognized. One step that may help could be to limit parking along the creek to employees. This could reduce the coming and going substantially. Part of the reason that this appeal has had to come to you is that Planning Commission was missing some of this deep background on the Ordinance. The original ordinance, 1830, written in 1991, was revised and updated in 2018, a collaborative effort between the San Luis Drive community and the Planning Commission. Three of you were on Council when it received final unanimous approval. Unfortunately, in the four years since you approved the revised ordinance, the membership of the Planning Commission has changed substantially. Six of the seven members who worked with us on that revision were not on the Commission when this proposal was brought to them, and the seventh resigned shortly after the vote on the Hub. Currently, the Planning Commission has no one on it who was there only four years ago. A group as crucial to the city as the Planning Commission needs institutional memory. It is vitally important to its functioning. Unfortunately, the night the Hub was reviewed, that lack of perspective was sorely felt. I sincerely hope that the applicant will be able and willing to address these concerns so the city will be in compliance with its own rules and that we will not find that this project will be cited later as a precedent for other proposals not conforming to the intent of the Ordinance 1651. The project at its core is a good one. I hope accommodation will be found so we can all enjoy it. Bob Lucas 1831 San Luis Dr. 805 459 4344 Sent from Mail for Windows