This morning we started bright and early with a fire department update in Public Safety. Nothing monumental stands out in memory about the report except that actual data regarding call volumes would be coming soon. On Monday Jon Wilkins was appointed chair of the Public Safety committee and this was his first day leading the committee. He did a fine job.

In Conservation we just had committee appointments for the Open Space Advisory Committee. Four applicants for Four positions. So that wasn’t too exciting.

In PAZ we did a plat extension for another subdivision looking for more time. We also made some adjustments to the access restrictions for the parcel at the corner of old highway 93 and Reserve street in preparation for the upcoming Autozone store. Our main piece of business was the continuing discussion over subdivision regulations.

First we reconsidered the decision last week to eliminate the requirement for boulevard sidewalks on urban residential streets with traffic volumes under 250 average daily trips. Staff was a little shocked by this decision and put together an argument for why we may want to reconsider. Council’s motivation was to provide relief for developers faced with the new wider street standards. The benefits of boulevards are many. They provide a place for trees to grow, make for nicer pedestrian environments, provide a place for snow storage, are easier on people in wheelchairs since they don’t have to go up and down over all the driveway cuts, and provide a place for signage and light poles.  We had also worked hard over the last several years to convince developers to stop skimping on them. It seems like a big step backwards to remove the requirement.

I was won over by the argument and willing to add them back into the requirements but I’m not sure how much traction it was getting with everyone else.  There wasn’t much more to say on the subject but folks wanted some time to think on it so we left that one hanging for a decision later on.

The next item was related to private roads. Planning board had banned them. Staff was arguing to put them back in. The idea is that in order to make development possible on some parcels the roads may need to be substandard. We want to permit the development but don’t want to get stuck maintaining roads that don’t meet our design standards. So the solution is to allow them to have a private road with a public access easement. The easement gives us the authority to require maintenance from the private owners. Our attorney clearly had some reservations about this and he pointed out that having the easement created shared liability. I’m a little foggy on how that ended but I think we put the provision for private roads back in.

The last item was related to short courts. Short courts are glorified shared driveways. Planning board banned them too. Personally, I’m a fan of short courts. Not sure what the big fuss is. They let developers squeeze in a couple of more units in the back when their density allows it. Unfortunately I had to leave 15 minutes early from the meeting so I’m not sure where they went with this one.

 

After lunch we started with a COW meeting to discuss the plans to restructure OPG. The Mayor and Bruce made a presentation on what they are planning. There are still a lot of details to work out but the basic idea is to make a Development Department that rolls together the work of OPG with the building department and most of Public Works. The streets division, sewer, and shops would still be under Public Works. There are still a lot of questions on how this deal could work. For the most part I think folks are willing to explore the idea and are even optimistic that it may be a good solution.  Lots of questions about the details though.

 

Then we got into Public Works where we discussed the new sidewalk proposal coming from our sub-committee. I’ve discussed this in previous posts and people can go to http://www.missoulagov.org/Sidewalks for a recap. The gist is that we are looking at ways to make new sidewalk installations with a much more limited cost for the adjacent property owner with the balance of the cost being picked up by the general tax base.

Over the years that we have had this discussion one of the objections to changing the financing method is that all the folks currently paying down assessments would not be happy about picking up the tab to offset other people’s assessments.  To address this the subcommittee proposed that there be a formula that applies the subsidy to the balances of existing assessments as well as new ones. We also discussed providing some relief for people who recently paid for their sidewalk assessments in cash rather than participate in the financing program.

 

To my surprise the other committee members were more inclined to make a clean cut from the past and just apply the program to the new projects. The public comment we received was also mixed on this subject. We had people argue that it doesn’t make sense to pay on the past assessments since every dollar that goes to relief of current payers is money that could have been going to new sidewalks. Other folks were there to point out the injustice of making them pay for their projects and now contribute to provide relief to others. There was a woman there from the project we did on Lolo street who reminded me that when I voted for her sidewalk I told staff that I would never vote for another sidewalk project until we fixed this problem. She is currently paying $160 per month on her mortgage to pay for her sidewalk.

I’m going to continue to advocate for providing relief to current payers and possibly provide a fund or at least an exemption for people who just recently paid for theirs in cash. Nothing we do will be entirely fair but almost anything we do will be better than what we have now.