Welcome to the City of Rockville Planning Commission, meeting number 1812. We're delighted to hear here. We have a very interesting schedule tonight with our issues from all around the city. As as chairman Hill is out of town and so is Commissioner Callister and are unable to be with us tonight, but we have. Commissioner Hadley, Mr. Lighteman, Mr. Treham and Commissioner Ostele here and we will start cooking along here. Anything from staff to start? No sir, we rattle off on agenda item number one. I think we're ready to go. The notice is good and we're ready to get started. All right Margaret I'll read the introduction for you. First item we have is STP 2012-00112 of Sightland for 1900 Chapman Avenue project owner LLC for development of the former Simms property. I'm glad to see this is finally on the agenda. Excuse me Mr. Chairman, Chris, could you? I would like a real opinion of whether you can have this meeting without having wherever is a minimum, which I would presume would be more than 5 out of 7. This is really unexpected. I have no idea what's going on here, but certainly you can't have meeting without having a regard number of members present. Is it a core impressive? We have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. we're acting just the way we're doing. Correct. So thank you very much for your comment, but this is having a proper quorum for a conductor in business tonight. Margaret. Thank you. Good evening. As you said, this is a property that has for several years now contained the Sims retail store. It's a 5.29 acre property with the 70,000 square foot to story building. And 371 parking spaces, totally surface parking spaces. The applicant would like to develop it as a two-phase project. Building one will contain 319,791 square feet in total. That includes 1152 square feet of office, 1443 square feet of leasing office, and 3,731 square feet of amenity space. Building 2 will be entirely residential and it's made up of 335,430 square feet. In total, the buildings will contain 658 multi-family residential units. It's broken down into six different types anywhere from efficiency to three bedroom. 15% of the units will be moderately priced dwelling units. The applicant is also asking for a waiver from the requirement that the transformers be undergrounded. They've included a substantial wall and gate structure in the back to obscure the transformers from you from the property. And I believe we'll be mostly, or if not totally, obscured from the railroad tracks. Approval of these above ground transformers will require a waiver by you the planning commission. The APFO, the application will result in the need for traffic mitigation and it must be completed prior to receiving non-compensary permit for the second building. The city has adequate water and sewer capacity but the water flow and sewer capacity in the immediate area is insufficient. A water and sewer letter has been issued by the Department of Public Works indicating what measures need to be taken to remedy the situation and in fact this affects not only this property it affects 1800 Rockville Pike property as well as the 1592 rockville pipe building. There's talk and I would let the applicant explain it more if you need more of a more less of water and sewer club to share the expenses to get this done. The schools, the property is served by farmland elementary, tilting the middle school and Walter Johnson High School. The other developments have been included in the calculations. Not only the developments in the city, but in the county have been included in the calculations of first-school capacity and they're still passing below the 110%. Fire and emergency, there's no significant impact. Firehouses, they're located on Rollins Avenue, just a couple of blocks that are really blocked. Blocking a half away, second call would come from Hungerford. But this is not a high-risk building that requires that there be three stations able to respond within 10 minutes. All track, and just for your information too, all required parking to serve all of the uses in the building is being provided in the exact number needed. Traffic eights intersections were studied. The transportation report shows seven out of the eight intersections would continue to operate at acceptable levels during the AM and PMP gowers. Mitigation however is required at the Rockville Pike and Tumbrick Parkway intersection. And trafficking transportation is requiring that a right turn lane along westbound Tumor Parkway be installed on Tumor Parkway right at 355. Doing this will allow the intersection to operate at an acceptable level. Bicycle lockers and racks are being provided on site in the amount required. A transportation improvement fee is also being required of this project towards the multimodal improvements throughout the city. All trees required by the Fortune Tree Preservation Ordinance are being planted on site. Noise, a condition is being included in the recommendation for approval in order to limit on on site activity by moving trucks or trash trucks or that kind of thing to try and make sure that the residents aren't disturbed by that. Offsite noise levels, however, were addressed and studied along the way, but did not get included in the first version of the staff report. To give you a little background on that, the offsite noise level is emanating from the Metro and CSX tracks. Produce a level that exceeds the guidelines behind building two in the area that's the open space. Of course, some of the building may suffer from it, but sound-deadening building materials are available to mitigate the noise within the buildings and further analysis will be required to be conducted during the building permit and construction phases to reduce the noise to an acceptable level. Noise within the exterior park area would require a 20-foot tall noise attenuating wall along the tracks as well as twin brick parkway. Staff did not consider the wall to be a desirable mitigation in order to relieve noise in an outdoor area and is recommending deviation from the environmental guidelines. So not have to implement that. The application meets the requirements of the zoning ordinance for green building, open area, public use space and building design. Staff is recommending approval of the application and in order to ensure that all requirements are met, 34 conditions have been included in the recommendation for approval. And with that, if you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. Thank you, Margaret. Any clarifying questions of staff? Done. I have one that may fast demonstrate my ignorance, but when I look at pages 10 and 11 regarding transportation, on the one hand, we learned that four intersections, two in the city and two not in the city, will exceed capacity during the PM commuter peak hours. And yet we have the finding that seven out of the eight intersections study would continue to operate at acceptable levels. So I'm trying to reconcile exceeding capacity with acceptable levels. Can you help me? No. I believe that that had to do with the CTR and then the further traffic study, but I would ask that Rebecca Torma addressed that one. In fact, I had some questions about not fully understanding how they calculate this, how you would have minus numbers and require mitigation. So with that. Before we'll be able to start answering that question, my comment for exactly the same sort of thing is the school figures included all the possible permutations from 1592 and 1800. Did you do in the traffic arrangement? Was it done only for this particular site? Or did it also include everything that's happening within a quarter mile that we've already approved? It also included everything. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Traffic and transportation. It's been a while since this report was written. Basically what happens is an intersection can continue to fail as long as they don't make that intersection fail more than 1%. So if you have an intersection that's currently failing and the applicant comes in and they don't add more than one percent of trips. It can stay the same. The word acceptable is maybe not the correct term, but generally they are not making any intersection with the exception of the one exceed moreick Park is a Tumbrick Parkway I think in 355. They are exceeding it by 1%. So they're bringing the intersection to fail by more than 1% therefore they have to do mitigation. So if you have an intersection that is currently failing and they don't put more than 1% trips at that intersection then they don't have to mitigate that intersection. In future computations, does that 1% then get it, get added into the acceptable level so that someone else comes in and adds another 1%? No, it would be failing. So it's just adding on top of everybody. So the next person comes in, they'll add in this development trips and then they'll add in their trips. Okay, it's just adding on top of everybody. So next person comes in, they could, they'll add in this development's trips and then they'll add in their trips. But you're still only calculating your trips. So it's only the difference between, the difference is between what is background, which would be this development and what you're adding. So if you're still not adding 1% to that intersection, then you would not need to mitigate. So that actually means that the standard does go up? Yes. How are we to determine with the chart that you have in your memo on page 7-4, in one of the appendixes, with the traffic and transportation memo? I think it's also in the body of the staff report. There are one, two, three F intersections that have the same VC ratio background traffic to total future traffic. How are we to distinguish which one is the one that, you know, I don't see any 1% change, how do we sort out what they're putting in, and given that they're decreasing the PM traffic, and I hate to ask this because a mitigation is going to be very nice. But anyway, we'll start with that question. Basically, if you look at all the intersections, usually take number, intersection number three, Rockville Pike at Twin Brook Parkway. You can see in the PM at background and PM, it's 1.13. and if you go to total future it's still 1.13 and technically even though it's failing they don't have to mitigate because they're not exceeding it while they might be still adding some trips to that intersection. Technically the applicant has suggested the mitigation at the intersection of twin-brook and 355, and we also have another developer that's actually supposed to do that. So this developer did not take into account another developer doing mitigation at the intersection. The developer technically, because they don't exceed it by 1% does not, is not required to do mitigation. They agreed to do it, and I think they can clarify why they've agreed to do it. I think it has to deal with a half percent or something. But they, but you can see the numbers don't look like they are exceeding by 1 percent, but they have agreed to do it. Right. Because I mean also the intersections numbered 5 and 8 also, you know, stay, well, no, I guess 8 gets better by 1%. But, okay, so why 3 and not 8? And excuse me, why 3 and not 5? Like I said, they applicant and agree to it. I think it's like based on the number of trips, it's if you round up, like they exceed it by half a percent, so they rounded up to 1%. And therefore, they just assumed mitigation at that intersection. If I could done, while we're on this, just this mitigation, I mean that intersection would certainly needs some mitigation. Has the state highway agreed to this particular, okay, so they're all on board. I didn't say anything from them, maybe I missed it. And the other thing there, there was something I may have just read this. They're talking about improving a five foot sidewalk. Is that the width of the sidewalk once improved? It's one of the conditions. Yeah. I'll find the page in a second. I think it's page 27, number 25. That's what wide sidewalk is. There's an existing sidewalk and because they're adding a lane, so they're going to have to move the sidewalk back and then they're going to reconstruct the sidewalk. And how wide will the finish the new sidewalk be? That will be five feet. And that's the most they can get. There is, it's very, once you add add that lane in there's very limited right away. Is there going to be any kind of room for a tree lawn or anything like that? I don't remember. The applicant might be able to answer that. Okay. And I'm just curious if Sims went out of business, why was there so much traffic coming in and out of there? Or is that just what the traffic counts are based on the square footage of use that they have there? It's based on the square footage of the use that they're- Not with- Actually, okay. Go for it. Clear questions? Jack? Um, of staff? Yeah. I think it's a little bit difficult to do. Go for it. Questions? Yeah. So that sidewalk that's five feet is there going to be anything else that has to go in that space like power poles or anything? I don't believe so. I think it I don't think the utilities are an issue. Or anything else that would reduce from five feet the walkable or bikeable with. No. No. I don't recollect about the polls, but I do know that there's sort of a notched out area that's kind of a pull off area that's in front of the entrance to the building. Whether that's, I must be in the right away and I would assume that part of that would become then the turn lane. So it's just the rest of it shifting over to where it is along with that. Okay. along with that. I just want to make sure I'm I'm going to understand this. So there is a ten decibel a difference between... There's a... The county requires 65 decibel A. The noise plan says that it's clocking in at 75 decibel A. And according to the study here, 65 is like heavy highway noise. So am I rean is correctly whenever I say 75A, decimal A is louder than highway noise? I mean, it seems like a simple question, I don't know why I'm having a hard time grasping. I mean, that's pretty loud, right? But I would defer questions about this to the... Yeah, we're going to listen to the question to the no no I don't person here I understand but staff agreed that the noise level can be mitigated in your report right you said city staffs are the paying that mitigation's required it looks like it would take a 20-foot tall wall okay okay thanks we have to say that there's other things that we could do. Any other questions at the moment? I just had to follow up on it just a wee bit. So is that to say that staff recognizes the potential noise problem but is leaving that for later resolution? But staff really takes no position as to the effect without a wall. I think staff's position is that we recognize there is a noise issue at that location. However, it's limited just to the exterior park on the northeast corner adjacent to the rail. And given the intermittent nature of the noise and also given its location and its use, we don't feel that mitigation is necessary, as far as a sound attenuation wall. Right, and with regard to the 20-foot wall, it would be what is required, what's the view as to that? Is that aesthetics primarily? Primarily, aesthetics, and also, we wanted to maintain as much, I wouldn't say continuity, but between the this property and adjacent properties possible we can wall would you track from that okay I haven't a couple questions on the wall thing just for staff just to clarify I mean it up a rock and I'm glad we have I think the same attorney here that you might remember that. There was a wall put in for noise mitigation. And I remember having questions about that. What it was like to have a green space wedge between a building and a sound wall. But I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. That's right next to 270 and a very busy exit ramp from 270 where the noise is probably continuous. I mean, is that the difference there? I'm not familiar with the upper rock project of Jim or somebody may be to offer an opinion, but I think that might be an issue with interior noise levels. And in this case, this is exterior, but again, I'm not familiar with the upper rock case. I mean, I don't know what the decibels, how they compare, but. I think it is dealing with the exterior noise. The building is required to be constructed to meet interior noise requirements regardless. So I think I recall correctly, and the applicant's attorney can perhaps correct me that it wasn't an exterior noise issue at up Iraq, but that the wall mitigated that. And is it continuous noise source a little bit different than the rail line. It is, you know, highway noise. Right. I mean, certainly standing on the sim site versus the upper rock site. I mean, there's no questions. The noise was much worse to me anyway at Upper Rock, but I didn't manage the time my visits to a freight train. It sims. I don't manage the time my visits to a freight train. It sims. I don't know how. OK. And I just, the other question I had on the staff, memo was the idea of limiting the hours of operation for the park is one way to deal with it. But I don't understand how that's going to work if the noise is coming from intermittent freight trains. How do you limit access to the park when the freight trains coming through? The issue with the issue with the noise is in the park itself. So if you limit access to the park, you alleviate or mitigate that impact. When you have to do that all the time, because the, you know, how, I mean... Well, I think the idea behind doing it in the evening was that you don't have the, the other ambient noise, meaning the traffic around you. So it's louder or a greater impact in the evening hours. And the applicant has offered some other possible mitigation that they were going to present in their in their I'm looking forward to sound study because I Anyway, Jack, just to follow up on that and it's really a question for Our attorney because staff was kind enough to give me the environmental guidelines under which this is all going. And one of the comments, this is in the county's guidelines that the city has adopted. And it says noise levels above an outdoor LDN of 62 DBA have been found to cause widespread complaints and occasional threats of legal action. Of course here we're going to hire then, we're going to 68 or whatever according to the report. That's the background of my question for you, is that right now any mitigation of noise is really the responsibility of the applicant and not of the city to mitigate. My question is that if the city way knowing that the noise is above county guidelines if the city chooses as we might do tonight to wave the typical mitigation strategies does that put the city at risk the typical mitigation strategies. Does that put the city at risk in terms of future legal action of being on the hook for financing mitigation of that noise once this project is built out? No, it does not. Could you give me a little background of how that would work or not work? The cities, the cities part in this in terms of a planning procedure is to follow our environmental guidelines that rely on the county guidelines. That is our pardon it. Any, there is also county noise laws that if a land owner violates that land owner is responsible. Those are two different functions. So if the noise in real life is generated by the owner and exceeds that, the level, the owner is responsible. In this case, the owner is not generating the noise. I understand that. Right, so our responsibility in this is to follow our planning procedure, which is to follow our environmental guidelines in terms of a planning developmental approval. That's our responsibility. I guess my question is, does it mean it's your no? Not just have my question is if five years from now, um, people living their, uh, filed suit against everybody, um, and says this outdoor noise, not caused by the developer, because by the sighting of the project near a known noise source. It says the city should not have waved those guidelines. Well, the city is responsible for following its guidelines and making a finding as to, in its approval, if it decides to deviate from its guidelines, you're responsible to make a finding to that. And that finding, as part of your approval in your planning process, is appealable during an appeal period. Once that time is over, we have done our job. That's really the remedy. Thanks. our job. That's really the remedy. Thanks. Have there been complaints from some of them aren't built yet, but you know, the other, you know, certainly there's plenty of residences right along the tracks, which obviously get the same noise. Well, it's interesting and, And of course, I think the sound expert can enlighten us a lot. But I remember the sound expert for the champion billiard site, which is farther down the tracks. And in fact, that site sits higher than the tracks. So by the time the noise bounced around, it was kind of stuck down in the tracks. So by the time the noise bounced around, it was kind of stuck down in the width. This site is different because the tracks are higher. But then again, there are a whole bunch of residents that have been there more than 50 years along different sections of the tracks. And so what their noise levels and whether it's uncomfortable I don't know that there's ever been a study down on that. Remember the noise study showed that there were an awful lot of places in the city that were pretty darn loud. What is it or another? What about the fits? I mean talk of a recent building or the one on first street I mean the two newer that are wedged between busy roads and I mean do we get a lot of compa- from those places? To my knowledge we have not received any from from either project. And those- both of those projects were required to meet the interior and noise guidelines and on the exterior side they had court yards and were cited a little bit differently. Yeah a little bit different than this situation but we have not received complaints from either of those. All right, thank you. Last question I have about the guidelines. The county 1983 guidelines has, the guidelines been updated since 1983. Lines are available on the Park and Planning website, so to our knowledge they have not been updated. Has technology in audible care, has that improved or have there been advances since 1983? That's not a free question, I take that back Jim. That'd be better for the applicant. My question is, so the applicant used a guideline from 1983 that to our knowledge has not been updated since 1983, correct? Okay, thanks. All right. All right. We are through with our questions. Are we not? No. For now. All right. I noticed that many applicants are present. You'd care to address the commission. I would note that we did receive a letter and in consultation with staff. We will, by the way, for the audience. This is the last time you'll see this chamber the way it is beginning tomorrow. It gets gutted and gets redone, which for me is sad because this thing used to be over on that side. And it's the same material as we had way back when the place was first built in 62. Anyway, Nancy, there are no winky lights for you. Please put me off my game here. No, no, but Andy will keep us cooking for what you're doing, but honestly, yes. We'll give you 12 minutes for your presentation and because we have such a great interest in the sound situation here, we'll make special provision to let your sound, your analysts there to come and speak up to 10 minutes to talk about and understand as a presentation, which will probably be very interesting to the citizens as well who are watching. I think that's absolutely and I appreciate that because I know he took a long time to try to get us to understand noise and how it's calculated and what the impacts are. And so I think this would be very helpful to give everyone a basic understanding of noise and then how the mitigation, the options are out there. So thank you. All right, so I'm Nancy Reglin. I'm Zoni Council for the applicant from the Law Farm of Shulman Rogers. The applicant of course is 1900 Chapman Project Owner and its development manager represented us from Hines are here tonight. And we're very happy to bring this application forward for a part of Chapman Avenue which we think is really going to transform what is a commercial service industrial street into a really mixed-use transit community. And we're going to do this by introducing comfortably scaled residential into this area. And we're going to activate the street scape with the office uses and the more storefront uses from our project. And this project is all within walking distance of Twin Brook Metro Station, all the new employment that's coming on Park Lawn in Fisher's Lane, and the shopping opportunities in Rockle Pike Quarter. So whether it's meeting the old master plan, which still is in existence, or the new one that we've all been talking about for years, I think we're meeting the spirit and the intent and the requirements of both. This application is very different from the original PAM application. It was completely redesigned with a new architect to incorporate the comments we got from the neighbors. So what you're going to see today is directly been created through their input. Our entire development team is here for questions and Mr. Matt Herson of Hines will begin with showing you the highlights of the project. Then Mr. Rob Stewart is going to of Hines will present the details and show you a lot more images so you can get a real understanding of what we're proposing. And once you've seen these images, I will be back to give you the justifications for the partially below grade, partially above grade transformer, the waiver that we need for that, and then we'll move on to the extra 10 minutes to do the presentation on noise with Mr. Skart-Harvey of Phoenix sound and vibration. And we appreciate the extra minutes, and I'll turn this over to Mr. Herson to get started. Thank you, Nancy. Mr. Chairman, members of the commission, I'm Matt Herson. I'm a managing director at Hines in Washington, D.C. I'm going to do a quick overview of our company since it's our first project in the city. And then turn it over to Mr. Stewart, who will get into some of the details. While Hines, as an organization, is new to the city, I am not, in fact, prior to rejoining Hines in 2006, I was an officer at JBG, and was the officer that brought the Upper Rock Project before this commission and the mayor and council along with Miss Regulant. So, in fact, it was that relationship that put us together with this application. Moving on to Hines. Hines is a global real estate organization based in Houston, Texas, with offices in 108 cities over 3,000 employees founded by Gerald D. Hines in 1957. It is a family-owned sole proprietorship. Their Washington DC office was opened in the late 70s. And its core business platforms are property development of which Mr. Stewart and I are a member. We also acquire and manage properties on behalf of investors. And we have a global property, commercial property management division. While it is a global company with many offices, it is run by local officers. I went to work for them right out of architecture school in 1980, graduated from good council high school. And left the firm in 1990 to work with my family here, rejoined in 2006 in the Washington Office. Next slide, note this slide. Unlike many real estate firms that specialize in a single form of development, residential, hotel, etc., Hines has developed a practice in multiple disciplines. I would call your attention to the residential while these slides are hardly robust for you to enjoy. On the thumbnail photo on the right side is a high rise and a 1 million square foot project developed in Barcelona, Spain, which is somewhat of a hallmark of a Heinz project now, large, complex, mixed use on the left, a recently delivered project in Madrid, Spain, which is seven stories, 14 units. So while it's a global company with a capability of doing enormous projects, they're tailored to each location in the historic district in Madrid. A small, intimately crafted project is something that our company excels at equally. Next slide. Globally, the firm was founded in 1957 by Mr. Heinz. It was a Purdue graduate and a mechanical engineer. And by this point, from 57 to currently, I believe in excess of 200 development projects, over 200 acquisitions, 350 million square feet. It's an enormous company, the largest private real estate firm in the world. The hallmarks of the firm are we're a traditional long-term owner manager of properties. Mr. Heinz being a mechanical engineer has brought a tradition of sustainability to the company. And it's also a core characteristic is working with signature architects, globally leading architects, and scaling each project to its market and its location. Next slide. Push the button again. Okay, there we go. And again and again, two more. Good. Hines in the national capital region. We've completed 9 million square feet of office space. We have under construction. If you've been on New York Avenue recently, the enormous former DC Convention Center site is our project together with Archstone. And under development, in addition to 1900 Chapman, an office tower in Tyson's corner, and a project for the American Association of Medical Colleges downtown. Next slide. This is the DC Convention Center site. The photo at the left relatively recent seven tower cranes on a single site of a variety of mixed uses. Next slide. My final slide and the small photo in the upper right hand corner is why we're all here. Which is to transform a corner of the twinbrook area from what is now 5.2 acres of asphalt in the vacant store into what is envisioned by decades of planning. There are certain unique elements of this project which I'll mention before Mr. Stewart gets into detail. Public benefit. It's a landmark design and very distinctive public spaces crafted for public use. Commercial at the phase one ground level, it is a portion delivered initially as commercial with the entire frontage of the building. Ready to be commercial when the market is there. A very strong pedestrian and transit oriented design. Street level activation, the parking for the project is below the buildings as opposed to above grade parking structures. A very strong commitment to high building performance of sustainability, which is a core criteria of the Hines family. Diversity and housing types from studios to three bedrooms. And as Mr. Stewart will explain, direct access to the units at the ground floor, where it is not commercial, giving an urban feel and a street activation. Privately financed public infrastructure, which Margaret Hall mentioned, water and sewer extension. We have formed a utility club to privately finance necessary public infrastructure. And finally, I'll mention that it was probably the first phone call I made on this project was in the first phone call I made on this project was in the middle of 2006. So that's how long it took for us to bring this transaction to where we are today. Jeff Hines, the president of our company, the son of the founder, was here about two years ago and visited the site with me. And the company really does value this as a unique opportunity to play a key part in the transformation of a formerly commercial industrial area to what can be a landmark residential community. We see this in a number of years as being very analogous to the RB corridor and Twinbrook can be clarined. This, I think we all went back to 1978, and we're in Northern Virginia. We'd see a lot of what we see now in Twinbrook and other areas, and we see this project and this opportunity as a key transition point to creating that residential mixed use vitality. And now, Mr. Stewart will. Thank you. Give us some details. Next slide, Mr. Stewart-Bull. Thank you. Give us some details. Next slide, please. This is a context map just showing the site and what's around it in the next of the Trembroke Metro. To the north of the site is Thompson Avenue, to the west, Chapman Avenue, to the south, is a Trembroke Parkway, right of way, which borders the site is Thompson Avenue to the west, Chapman Avenue to the south, is a twin-march-way, red-of-way, which borders the site, and to the east of the site is the CSX and Metro tracks. We feel this is a great infill site because it's completely underutilized. The sim site is vacant. It's 370 roughly odd parking spaces which are completely impervious. Next slide, please. Our plans for the site, as Miss Hall mentioned, are 658 residential units, 319 in the first phase, 339 in the second, with 5152 square feet of professional office at the corner of Thompson and Chapman. And that's, you can see that as the red portion of the slide there. The two buildings will be six story structures, five stories of wood frame construction over a concrete podium. The podium will have 15 foot four to4 height and be designed to be retail ready. So in the future if Chapman Avenue becomes a good retail location again it could possibly be converted into retail. And on the street level the residential units and commercial spaces wrap the parking garage so that you can't see any of the parking spaces on the first level. Next slide, please. Oh, sorry, I'll go back up one please. Oh, wrong way. Okay, one more. The main pedestrian access to the residential Okay. The main pedestrian access to the residential will be at the intersection of what we're calling the Paseo, which is the private drive which runs through the project. The Paseo is really a private drive that meets the city road code standards for a service road. And the main entrances are at the Southwest corner of building one and the Northwest corner of building two. Vehicular access is via the Paseo or via two entrances to the parking garage on Thompson Avenue. Additionally, there's an access at the rear of the site on Thompson Avenue to the Paseo, connects Thompson Avenue to the Paseo. And there's also an entrance to the rear of parking deck for buildings who at the rear of the Paseo. The loading will be at the rear of each of the buildings towards the railroad tracks. Next slide please. We've got one minute until the noise consultant presentation. That's about 12 minutes. Okay, I'll be quick. There are really three unique public spaces. One is the central plaza, which is the gatherings placed for the community. You skip to next slide. Next slide. And this is a rendering of the central plaza without the second building there, just so you can see the architecture of the first building. The next unique public space is that the SAO, which has the stufs so that the residents can access the units from the exterior of the building and this promotes a sense of community. And the third is what we're calling the woods, which is that linear park towards the tracks. And this is a park with a meandering path that our residents and the community can use and this turns into connects all the paths around the site and turns into a fitness trail and so residents can also walk their dogs. How am I doing on time? We are up. Okay. You have an opportunity to segue into the next bunch of 10 minutes, but that just makes it worse, so you're up. Well, actually, if we can go to the pictures that have the transformer, because I can do the transformer in 30 seconds. Would you tell us about the transformer and the request for... Yes, so what you're looking at right now is if you're standing in the paseo between the two buildings, and you can see that there's Birmingham, and that extension of the building is where the transformers are. And the next slide, please. There's another picture. This is as if you're coming in off a Thompson Avenue down the service drive and you can see the transformers, they're partially underground and partially a rough ground. They're partially in and a closed building but there's no roof to that building. So we don't meet any of the criteria 100% so we have to ask for a waiver. And the justification for the waiver is in your code and basically it says that if there's a reason why you can't go underground in that location that you have an opportunity to do it above grade. And so I don't have a picture of this, but if you recall many, many years ago before any of you were born, this area of Rockville Pike was used for industrial services, and this site is actually in the voluntary... Yeah, the voluntary cleanup program and what I'm showing here. Yeah, you can put that up. So there is some contamination on the site and in fact the plan for this site is to actually not excavate back there. So everything in the back of the site is actually getting built up. And if you would look at the garage sections in your thing for the garage in building one, you will see that the lowest level is only a partial level. There is nothing that we're attempting to excavate in the area of the spray area. And the placement for these transformers are forced in this location, because we're trying to create the urban street wall on all these corners. We have Twin Brook Parkway which has a steep and this CXX tracks which has an easement. And so it forces it right to this location. And so we've met the other criteria which says that you have to have it completely screened. You have to landscape it to buffer it. And we've done it in materials that are complementary to the building architecture. It's more than 80% screened. It's basically 100% screened and so we would ask for in this location under these conditions for a waiver to allow us to have this above ground transformer which as you saw is partially below ground and partially within a building. So while the parking is going to be the area where we're showing you this gray mass. The intent being leave it undisturbed. And so we built everything else up behind the ground. And so we built everything else up behind the ground. And so we built everything else up behind the ground. And so we built everything else up behind the ground. And so we built everything else up behind the ground. in the area where we're showing you this gray mass. The intent being leave it undisturbed. And so we built everything else up behind it. Are there environment or requirements to seal it in any way? I believe that there's monitoring that will be done, but the key is to have it undisturbed. Thank you for bringing that up. And one last question I have for later. All right, Mr. Harvey. I ask a question. I'll follow up. Well, let's have them finish there. Okay. This is the important part. Well, I don't know whichever. I had a question about the, can I just ask you what the nature of the environmental contaminant is? It is a, itbased solvent that was used to clean printing presses. Essentially, it's a gasoline. The tanks were removed in 1995. So the source was removed, but there is contaminated soil remaining. And our voluntary cleanup application with MDE provides that it is to remain undisturbed with a vapor barrier between the soil and any occupied space above. Hi, my name is Scott Harvey from Phoenix Noise and Vibration and I'm here to educate and answer questions about noise. And that's our big goal. We have the next slide, please. First of all, just some noise basics and some terminology. There's a lot of terms and we want to make everybody understand what they are. We measure noise in terms of decibels or DB. We A weight those decibels so they simulate human hearing. So the term DBA is thrown around a lot. We've got up here some typical noise levels of some common noises that you hear every day, and I'll throw your attention directly first to the 65 area, which is normal conversation at three feet. So when we talk 65 decibels, when you're having a normal conversation with someone at about three feet, that's about 65 decibels. And you can see how it changes as you go up and down in that range. I'll point out 75 decibels as a loud dishwasher or a washing machine. how it changes as you go up and down in that range. I'll point out 75 decibels as a loud dishwasher or a washing machine. It's a law of rhythmic scale. It doesn't change like we understand, like a linear scale. And one of the examples of that is what changes in noise level sound like. The classic example is a three decibel change in noise level is considered a barely perceptible change, whereas a ten decibel change is twice as loud. So it's not lending you as you see. That same change in noise level applies anywhere on the scale. So 33 to 33 is barely perceptible as is 90 to 93. So that's one of the beauties of this scale. We have the next slide, please. Nothing that we're talking about is damaging to human hearing. And per OSHA, you can be exposed to an average continuous noise level of 90 decibels for an eight hour time period before you have to wear hearing protection. None of the noise levels we're talking about here are that loud or that continuous. Next slide. Just a little bit about the site and our study. We did establish a study and that is there in detail. We made actual on-site measurements for a full 24 hours. We made them in positions A and C, as you can see. One next to the tracks and one next to Twinbrook. We made them in their locations so that we could separate the two noise sources and know just what the railway made and just what Twinbrook Parkway made. We divided our measurements into five minute time increments. So we took these five minute time blocks and we've got it all divided up over that full 24 hour period. This enables us to look at daytime noise, nighttime noise, and the culmination of all of that. Next slide. This is the unaltered noise level measurements and five, our five decibel, our five minute time blocks at point A. And you'll see the spikes as they go up and down. That's generally either freight train or passenger train. And we've highlighted in grade the nighttime noise level or the nighttime timeframe is the gray area. And that's really key to the concept that we're presenting in terms of the deviation that's being requested is understanding nighttime noise levels. The noise criterion that's established in the 1983 guidelines has been there since 1983. As a matter of fact, a lot of the criterion that are still used today all across the country were established in the mid-70s when EPA did a lot of noise studies and those are still in use today. So they are what they are. There hasn't been a whole lot of changes in terms of noise levels. 65 DBA LDN, which is the specification, is very common in Montgomery County, for Georgia's County, Fairfax County, and many other municipalities across the country. Part of the LDDN standard. We had 65 DBA LDN. The LDN represents the day night average noise level. Day night average noise level is the average noise level over that 24 hour period, but there's one caveat to that. By definition, during the nighttime noise, during the nighttime periods, you have to add a tendusable penalty to the nighttime noise, during the nighttime periods, you have to add a ten-dessable penalty to that nighttime noise. And if we can see the next slide. Here we are with the same slide, but how do we calculate LDN? We jack up all the noise levels by ten decibels, and that accounts for our human sensitivity to noise. So when I'm impacted by noise, we artificially raise the noise level at night to account for our sensitivity when we're basically sleeping. And you can see one of the unique things about this site is that you've got nighttime noise levels due to freight trains passing by this site. And that accounts for the noise levels that we're seeing. The average noise level during the day is about 68 decibels at point A. But when I take the LVN at that same place, I'm at 75 decibels due to nighttime noise levels and the penalty at night. Those are two critical things going on here. Next slide please. So you can start to go back to that slide. So what you're telling me is that at two in the morning, 90 VBA is equivalent of a loud lawnmower, lawnmower, three feet away from me. That's correct. And is there your experience that someone can sleep through a lawnmower three feet away from you at two in the morning, giving normal circumstances? Not when they're outside. Okay. And that's another part of the discussion here. And I think some of the confusion about what we're what to be asked for is there is nighttime noise levels and There's excuse me outdoor noise levels and indoor noise levels and the mitigation of those two But remember this slide has it 10 decibels added to it. So it's really 80 Well actually, it's really 90 because you say that the 10 decibel the perception to a human is noticeable correct or am I put where's the mouth? It's it's noticeable. Okay, but it's correction People would have a hard time listening sleeping through 80 decibels to I'll give you that Any other questions Next slide, please here Here we are looking at, we're using color to represent noise. The light blue area is areas, these are LDN values, according to the county guidelines. The light blue areas represent all areas that are less than 65 decibels. The yellow area is 65 to 70, and the tan area is greater than 70. Now, if we... most of the areas are quiet. Most of the areas are less than 65. 65 is the point where we have to mitigate or have to start thinking about mitigation. And I'll point out that most of the areas are less. And of course, along Twin Brook, you've got some impact and the most severe impact is along the back. That's the LDN. If we look at that just at the daytime noise level, just the average noise level during the daytime, I take the nighttime noise level out. We show that on the next slide. Do you see a significant difference? We push that 75 to 70 zone further towards the tracks and the 70 in greater zone is almost off the last slide. I mean, the next slide, excuse me. This gives us some options. What are our options? We can construct a noise wall around twinbrook and along the back of the railway, it would be up to, if we reduce the nighttime, the complete entire LDN number, which is basically making it quiet at night in the outdoor area. That would require a 22-foot wall. If we looked at just the daytime noise levels, it would require a 12-foot wall. Another option is to change the designation of the area from the active use to adjust a landscape buffer. Primarily what we're talking about is that open space to the rear of the building. That's what the issue is. That's where we're asking for the deviation. We could change that to a non-open space or a non-public use space and not be held to the 65 standard. Another item would be to restrict activities within that to the restrict activities at night and only go by the daytime standard asking for the deviation then or to obtain a deviation for both the day night and the activities within the excess noise area. Round for the deviation is that the benefits of active use outweigh the low-lever intermittent impact. And the recommendation, the next slide, is the other direction. Yeah, is to take option four. If we limit the impact, we've got, we're down to 65 DBA. Remember that's equal to during the day, our average noise level is 68 decibels during the day. That's barely perceptible above normal speech. We've got short-term event. Mostly it's a walking path that's going through there. The likelihood of me walking through that area, as you've experienced, you walk through, you didn't see a freight train. So most of the time people will be walking through, they're probably not going to see a freight train. There's about 40 trains and a 40 trains passenger's hand freight throughout the 24-hour period. Each one takes about a minute. So we're talking about a 40 minute exposure period throughout that 24 hour time period. The likelihood of being there while the train goes by is pretty slim. And if you are there, it's going to be gone in a minute. And when it's gone, the noise level goes way down. It's very different than traffic noise, which is, as you experience, very constant. And there's the other issues that other people can bring up that, you know, a big wall of 22 feet is it blocks sound, it blocks light. I mean it blocks light, it blocks daylight, it blocks views, and it's kind of a graffiti attractor. So there's some maintenance issues there too. And that's all I have directly. All right. I could just make one point which is the deviation that we're asking for is for the exterior space. The buildings itself will have the 45 DBA interior noise level so that you can sleep at night even with a freight train going by. Those interior units will be designed so that your sleep is not interrupted. So we're talking about the exterior space. Excuse me. To go back, how do we know it's going to be 45 DBAs and a total. No, no, no, no, there's a condition in that we actually have to provide the information, the engineering information to show that the design of the building on all those areas that are impacted, all the faces of the building that are impacted, that they are designed with the types of windows, the types of sound attenuation, building construction materials, so that the units inside, when you actually take the measurement, that they are at the safe level inside the unit. So we have no qualms with that. That is pretty typical. That's what the fits did. That is what First Street did. They all had to do that up against the train tracks. So we're not talking about the interior space at all. Those will comply 100%. Good. I just asked one quick question about that. Since we're talking about high peaks of intermittent noise, as opposed to dull, raw of regular noise, the county guidelines that you're going to be required at the building code, building permit, to bring it to 45. That's an average of 45. That's not peak of 45. So my question is, just for my own and our knowledge, with the outdoor peaks at 90L, with the additive factor in the middle of the night, these intermittent, really loud ones. What, even though inside will be an average of 45, what will that 90 be reduced to on the interior? Well, it's really 80 because the 90 remember is jacked up by 10. It's jacked up by 10 because it's in the middle of the night and people are asleep. So assuming it's the 90, what's the 90 come down to since we're talking about interruption of sleep. So the experience it will be actually measurable of 50 and experienced as 60 by the resident. And 60 is the equivalent of a conversation 65 is the equivalent of a conversation in the room So it would be like sleeping through a conversation in the room Starting up intermittently you're according to this chart. I just want to understand what's actually going to be going on That's that's a good point. I mean, we are at 60 or less, not 65. And 3DB is fairly perceptible. 5DB is significantly different. NDB is half as loud. So we're at the 50, we're going to be half as loud as normal conversation. 50 to company lack. Can you give me an analog to what the sleeper at 2 in the morning will be hearing when the 90 train goes through? Yes, I think between a quiet dishwasher and my washing machine. But it will be intermittent. Nancy, if you have them club. He's got a microphone. Okay. Okay. So what we're talking about is the use of the exterior space and just that corner that we're calling the woods. That's the landscape buffer. And what we have as an issue here is that, and if I can have a site plan, we actually connected the trail through this area of the woods instead of leaving it as a landscape buffer. We actually connected all the sidewalks so that you could do a loop if you were walking your dog, you know, or you wanted to run after work, you would be able to do a nice within the project loop on all the sidewalks and we included the trail around in the back. That is really the issue that we're asking for the deviation to allow that trail to continue to be there because the options are we can put a wall up so that the trail at night will meet the criteria even though we don't think anyone will be out on the trail at night. Or we can, what the staff has suggested and that we're fine with too, we can put signs up limiting the use of the trail at night so that there isn't anyone else on the trail in that corner of the property at night. Or we could take that part of the trail out completely and just leave it as a landscape buffer that nobody goes into that space and uses. Or the fourth option, which is the one we're asking for, which is to grant a deviation, recognizing that the noise is intermittent with the greatest noise being in the overnight hours when people should not be out there. And that on that basis, we think that that's acceptable to allow that woods to have the trail to go through it. Most of the open space is within the criteria. You saw all along Chapman, mostly down the Paseo, where our main public use space is all basically the building shield from the Metro and from the CXX heavy freight. And so they're all at acceptable levels. And you see that all the interior courtyards are at acceptable levels. So most of the space that we have outside for our residents and for the public meets the criteria. It is that segment of the trail that goes winds back by the metros that we'd like to leave there if we would have your finding that we could deviate to allow that to happen. All right. Thank you very much questions of the applicant. Does tree scape or green presence in any of that area help to mitigate the sound? No. The trees you can't plant a deep enough depth of trees to make a significant difference. Just a comment for which I shouldn't waste much time. But for those persons who have sleep habits or schedules that don't involve nighttime sleeping, I can see that, and we're talking exterior here, but I can see that we're relevant to the discussion of the inside dimension. Those people probably would appreciate the benefit of the 10 point spread as well. As we're assuming that the inconvenience, yeah, the irritability is only because you're trying to sleep at night if that's the case and it may not be the only reason but that's the primary reason. You don't need to comment. It's just for the record. You're coming. Jack? Yeah? Questions of the ampere? So we can't hold you accountable for using a 1983 audio standard. Has there been developments in how audible noise is measured since 1983? So for example, something more sophisticated than the government, the music industry, acoustic companies. I mean, what do they use? I mean, what standard? They're all deaf. Sorry. They all use the LDN standard, the 65 DBA LD standard. I mean the OSHA uses an average LAQ. You saw that one, that's still an average noise level over some time periods specified. The audio industry is not standardized at all. They're just making a sound good in terms of how speakers are loudspeakers sound. As far as residential development, it's 65 decibels, a weighted, LVN. And that applies to transportation, noise sources. It applies to railways, traffic and airports. And it can be argued about its applicability, but it is the standard that is there. Okay, fair enough. Anadotal, but I live 0.9 miles away from the railroad. The noise from the whistle and the rumble sometimes wakes me up in the middle of the night. And what I'm grappling with is, you experts are telling me that from the point A, if that's correct, the sort of the south, eastern corner, that the level is going to be a slight conversation. 60 decibels A. I'm not saying you're fibbing. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around having a 1983 adopted standard that your tell me is the current standard for using residential noise inside and I'm trying to reconcile that with my own experience of the point nine miles away and still getting woken up at two three in the morning with the whistle and the rumble of the train and I understand that you put a lot of thought into it because you're not going to go into economic venture if it's gonna fail because people are not gonna live there I mean that that's what I'm hoping right that you guys are thinking this through. Commissioner I don't know when your house was built. 2008. So, you know, and I also, though I'm not holding you that standard, I'm just saying in my mind, as we're proving this, this is where I'm thinking is okay, the rumble, the whistle people live in there, does that detriment the public welfare in this, this, not in their living units and not in their main outdoor recreational space that this project has created for them. All of those have been designed in such a way to protect their interior living units and their primary outdoor recreational space. It is just this one area of the exterior that has a walking trail or a running trail that may, you know, is at 68 DBA during the day and, you know, could exceed it if someone was there at night because of the higher sensitivity at night with the quieter of the background noise. So we're asking for the options in order to deviate from that to allow that trail to continue in that outdoor woods. There are several of us in this room that live closer than you do. Yeah, I just have a hard time. Can I clear? Can I? Yes, please. I think what he's asking is not just to set aside the outdoor waiver for the moment. Talk about a little bit about how you get it quiet enough inside. What techniques do you need? And whether that leaves windows that are posted in size, or how do you do this so that his question of the health and safety of the resident. Because we're not just talking about hearing loss. The county guidelines go into great detail about cardiovascular effects of noise that are far below the threshold that would cause hearing loss. So the question is, could you just tell us how you get from 90 LDM to 45 inside? And I'll let Mr. Harvey address that technically, but I will tell you someday go into a unit at the Fitz and hopefully the fire trucks will go out because we were there on a tour when it opened and we were facing Rockville Pike looking out the window and I could see the ambulance come out of the Rockville volunteer fire and go down the street and I could just barely hear in that dwelling unit the siren for the ambulance. It was amazing as a personal experience to see what quality of sound deadening they were able to do in the fits. We analyze, we'll take the architectural plans for the building and we will look at the size of the rooms and the size of the exterior wall surface areas. We'll see how much of that is composed of windows and we can calculate the outdoor to indoor noise reduction of that room and we'll do that for every noise sensitive room planned for the building. And- Is that include materials? The building material- Includes materials. And we will look at the sound transmission class for the exterior walls, and we'll look at the sound transmission class for the windows, and we'll see if it's providing enough reduction from the outdoor noise to the indoor to see if it's going to achieve the 45 decibels indoors that's required. Now it's 45 dba ldn again it's the average noise level of 24-hour period. My outdoor noise level the worst impact on the building is 75 so that's a 30 decibel reduction and and that's my goal and that's what we have to achieve. We will adjust STC ratings of windows, walls and doors until we achieve that reduction. Any other questions of the applicant at this time? I've just had a curiosity. How many decibels does a metro train create versus a freight train is about 80? The freight train's in the 80 range. A metro train is in the low 70s. It's that loud. Well, it's logarithmic, never mind. Yeah, it's, it's, um, a metro train is really much quieter. Yeah, absolutely. And our measurements include, there's a lot of metro trains going by the site. The measurements include the metro trains. We measured everything. Yeah. No, I was just curious. That was a very helpful presentation, Mother. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm sorry. I keep hanging things up. We've been discussing an ambient sort of situation. Do you have any data that would help us understand how many people, what degree of human presence would there be in this area? Is it's a trail there, but how many people are going to have dogs to walk? I mean, I know you don't know that, but I don't know if there's any average data that would help. Now, I would add a comment, which really would be for our discussion, but I suppose if a person found the area unpleasant, there isn't anything to compel the person to be there. But then back to the question of whether. Well, they wouldn't have to be there and there are other options that we have provided them so that they would not have to be in the area right by the tracks. They could do loops without going in the back and could there be some kind of disclosures and noise levels for people entering that area? We actually even discussed whether we would put in our leases an indication that has them recognize that they're adjacent to the tracks and that the outdoor trail. So if there is someone who is sound sensitive, they would know not to go into the trail that goes the closest to the tracks. We've done that for another project. That's a good idea. Right. And do any of these sound levels, exterior sound levels have a potential adverse effect on people with hearing devices on the operation of those devices? No. I was actually kind of hoping there'd be more than a trail back there. I mean, this may be a question for the designer. Well, so is it only going to be a walking path or are there any? Well, there is a walking path, but there is lawn and trees. So, you know, you can go there with your dog or whatever. Any benches or tables or anything? Closer into the peseo. That's where we're going to put the public art. And that's where the gathering spaces. We've left that pretty natural. It's really a big landscape buffer. And we just wanted to include the trail. And they did have to, at one point, they did have to at one point they did have a little bit different design for back there. But in order to plant all the trees, they had to alter it and pretty much come up with the design that they have now. Thank you very much. At this time, we'll be absolutely delighted to hear from the audience, people who are speaking for and against or modifications of this particular application. Well, our questions for applicants come after that? Yes. Okay. On the speaker list, he's smiling too broadly. Joe McLean is first on the list Cambridge Walk. Good evening. My name is Joe McLean. I'm president of Cambridge Walk 2. Cambridge Walk communities are the closest residents to the 1900 Chapman property. We have already submitted something in writing to you telling why we support this project. Basically, the developers listened to the community, both from Cambridge Walk 1 and 2, and other people in Twinbrook. And this trail, the number of trees on the property, the massing of the buildings, the sidewalks, all of these things were affected by our comments and we're very happy with that. As someone who's leaving this meeting and getting on Metro to go home, I can tell you that the walk from the Twin Brook Metro station to home in any direction can be a pretty lonely and scary walk at this time of night. So the vitality and the street life that this will add to Chapman Avenue will be a real plus for the neighborhood. The other thing is that there's almost no residence on this side, the other that side of the track. It's all on our side, the other side of the track. So we're hoping that this will bring a little vitality. And by the way, we were not in favor of a big wall. We just think that's going to be a tablet for graffiti. We like the fact that all of the tree mitigation, all those trees are going to be planted on the property. It'll look better from the tracks. If we're coming in the property. It'll look better from the tracks if we're coming in the metro. It'll look better from the street. And we like the trails. It'll give us more places to walk. And we're very pedestrian and transit-oriented development. So I thank you for your patience. Thank you. Okay, thank you to any questions. Okay. And good Okay. Thank you. Any questions? Okay. And good one. Good evening. Good evening. Planning Commission members. I'm Ann Goodman. I resided 1109 Clygate Drive in Rockville in the Twin Brook neighborhood. I'm not objecting particularly to this project development tonight because I see some good environmental impacts on it. However, I do want to make the point that we've made before, I'm speaking for myself and my husband Jim Farley, that we feel that it's the growth around the twin-brook Metro is getting a little bit scary. This project is one of many that have been and will continue to be proposed for Rockville, not only twin-brook, and while development around twin-brook is inevitable, we have concerns about density and its effects on the neighborhood. In addition, there are issues which this and other development plans ignore that we'd like to mention. Nowhere in this or any of the other applications have we seen any information on the impacts on things within the neighborhood. We've been in Twinbrook for 24 years, and we can see Edmundston drive from our front windows cutting through from Beers-Mildred Rockville Pike. The traffic in that cut through in both directions has increased astronomically over the last few years. It has even been difficult to get out of the neighborhood in morning during rush hour traffic. We understand that Twinbrook Parkway is already one of the busiest streets in the neighborhood and it's likely to become busier. We are aware of at least five other developments near the Twinbrook Metro station by our estimates which are probably low. That's 3600 minimum new residential units. That's a lot of folks. And you can mitigate and you can walk and you can bike is still a lot of cars. So we would like to see some traffic studies on Edmiston on Twin Brookwinnbrook Parkway, to see if there is any estimate of how this might impact within the neighborhood. And the 3600 estimate is probably a low figure because we've got other developments that are going to continue to be planned. We've got the Rockville Pike Plan coming down the pike, so to speak, so it's a little scary sometimes. With regard to parking, there's been a lot of different parking discussions about different development. And my concern is that I don't want us to see to be like the District of Columbia, where people just can't find places to park and near their own homes. Safety, a lot of people, some of them are going to be not so nice people, hopefully most of them will be nice guys. But we're concerned about safety in the neighborhood because of the increased traffic and particularly pedestrian safety on Rockville Pike. We've had several incidents recently where people have been killed or injured. We're also concerned about the nature of the Twin Brook neighborhood. A lot of these developments that come in are gonna be sort of high end. Twin Brook is not necessarily a high end. It's a nice and diverse friendly neighborhood for the most part and we would like to preserve that character. We are concerned about infrastructure issues and we question the assumption that a majority of the folks who live here are gonna what ride Metro. And if they do, can Metro handle them? We hear horror stories about Metro every day. Can the roads handle the increased traffic? Can Pepco handle the increased electrical drain? I was glad to hear that the calculations for APFO included both upcoming developments and the county. That was a good thing to hear. And we'd also be interested, I know we have a good water system, but if the increase in residences is, as it may become, we are concerned about cumulative effects on water and sewer. We implore the playing commission to evaluate each of these developments in accumulative sense, not one at a time, not in isolated or in a vacuum. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. Inferally. Next person on. You're doing so. You do it. My name is Jim Farley and I'm speaking for myself and my wife and good. I spoke. The Monday is going to be short and sweet. The following are some anecdotes regarding the problems that rampant development will probably make worse for Rockville and Twin Brookville in particular. We can see the train from our window. Pepco has said that they will apply for a substantial rate increase every nine months. Since they did not receive what they were asking for at the last iteration, they'll put a freeze on hiring until the outcome of the new negotiations. Pepco just doesn't care for its customers and won't take care of them. During the National Night Out yesterday, one of our neighbors said that Metro's red line stops by his workplace and the escalator allows people to be off at his office's front door. However, the escalator is broken and he rides to the next stop and it takes him about 10 minutes to walk back to work from there. He's young and can do that. I can't do that. But the escalator repairs will not be finished for 10 months. And we mentioned, we noticed in the paper that this weekend, there are going to be a couple stations out on the red line, and people who want to use it, going to have to take buses past those stations. Also, one of our twin-brook neighbors said that there are no seats available when the red line from shady grows get to the twin-brook station. That's only three stops about This is true in rush hour and it off peak times We found this to be true when we use metro Fortunately some younger folks usually often assault folks their seats. Otherwise, it's very very difficult for me. I have very bad balance problems We don't want parking problem around Twinbrook Metro to be similar to that of Washington DC. There are going to be cars there. A short time ago, Anne's nephew, who lives in Atlanta, was visiting friends in DC. He could not find a legal overnight parking place. So he drove to Rockville to park his car in our home. He took Metro back to DC and then the next day he visited us at a scheduled. He was going to drive in both ways. We had to make two trips to the Metro station because of DC parking. We don't want Metro that parking around Twin Rook to be the same as that. So it's going to be a lot of cars and the parking spaces usually drop down. Thanks. Thank you. Any questions? Okay, Mr. Sam Shipkovets, please. Good evening. Before I get to my substance, I'd like to repeat my request for a opinion on quorum. Can you cite a code section that gives the quorum requirements? No, Mrs. Schiswitz. I can't off hand, but our rules of procedure. Yes, sir. Let me take a stab at it. Marcy, Mrs. Schiswitz, I can't off hand, but our rules of procedure. Yes, sir. Let me take a stab at it. Marcie, please. See if I'm doing this adequately. I'm sorry, I can't hear. Why don't you just read it off? Just a. Rules of procedure, section 5G, quorum. A majority of the members of the Commission constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. So not to be funny or tongue in cheek, but 5 and 7, we would constitute a majority for business. So thank you for the question. Thank you for being on your toes and team is accountable. So Mr. Chair, I think, Quorum is here. Quorum is here to kind of business. Second, I'd like to ask for Mr. Tiner's recusal. I put that in writing in a letter to the mayor. Mr. Tiner, who lives around the corner from me, was after me in the early 90s. I've never figured out why, but all kinds of complaints have been filed by Mr. Tiner against me. I literally was stuck here in the 90s, and I think that was part of the reason why he did that. But with that said, I'm now being pursued by the city. I've had a new roof replaced in the past two weeks. And the city has said, well, your materials for your house edition roof are not to our standards, even though there's going to be an addition put on top. Any rate, and Mr. I forgot his name, but today rate Let's just say he's Been named as someone who was involved in this but with that said getting to his point I doubt if he speaks for anybody by himself. I don't have any facts either way and I'll get down to my substance now. Mr. Susquebets, if you can just remind everyone, sir, to just direct your comments to the chairman and keep it factual and let's not be accusatory. That's pleased. I said I'm getting into substance now. Excellent, thank you. The Miss Anne Goodman and her husband, especially her husband. Okay, Mr. Susquevitz, please, sir. Can you direct to the chair and just take to the factual, as it applies to you and the applicant, sir, please. Yeah, that's her doing. Okay, thank you. As I said, he mentioned, as his primary concern, the one that I've spoken to with Miss Regulin, and that is we don't want to be bothered by anybody else's development, which translates as Ms. Goodman's husband said into we don't want to have anybody parking on our street because there's not enough parking in the proposed project. I've calculated the number of units to be 660 and I was given a list but wasn't broken down by three units to units and my previous long ago experience was that a three bedroom was required and I'm presuming that that's not the case here but neither case there should be a minimum of a parking space for one bedroom or an efficiency to parking spaces for two bedroom and at least three for a three bedroom. And as a basic big picture given 660 units, there should probably be at least 1200 parking spaces and there isn't. There's approximately one per unit. And we don't want to have people going across the Twin Brook Parkway overpass over Subway and taking their second cars and putting them on our street and that very seriously is my number one concern. I'm going to go through my other list. The posting and these papers don't give a list of variances that are being requested. I appreciate having that and I'll go check that. But for every variance or waiver, I would appreciate having a list of those so that we can get into specifics. I hope that you can hold the record open for at least a week or so that we can get to the details. It's been stated that the sewer and water requirements aren't up to the present codes and certainly knowing a little bit about this field going from a 24-inch line which is adequate at one point to a 36-inch line is not a small undertaking it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're going the distance of Rockville Pike that's going up to the radio shack down to Twinbrook Parkway, the transformer. I don't know enough about what is going on here to give any real opinions. I am an electric engineer and with PCBs floating around and other possible problems. I don't know if there was a line they talked about a attempt to keep whatever has been damaged soil away from whatever is being planned on top. I don't know whether it's PCBs underneath or whatever the contamination is. They just said gasoline. We're in it and I don't know what actually that is. All right, with that said, we come to some of the big picture items. Excuse me, Mr. Chair, Mr. Shipkivitz, for about five minutes. Okay, give me, I have literally one major point. That's fine. Go ahead, make your point. The railroad passes through there. And it's next to what is called a trail. Railroads were built in the 18th, the rest of the 1860s. There's many cases, as I'm sure Mr. Regland knows, where the railroad just had a bunch of goons come three people off their land. I would hope that before anything is voted on that the applicant is required to produce a title report that goes back to at least 18 30. As I said, and there's many cases in Virginia where people are literally thrown off the land and physically beaten up and thrown off the land and some of these people were Indians, not Indians, but indigenous peoples. And therefore, even though the railroad might physically be there, they may not legally own the land. And I would ask Miss Regalind to have a title search done going back to the 1830s to find out who actually owns the land where the railroad is and the surrounding quarter mile. If there are Indians living there before then all the deeds on earth since 1790 are void as I'm sure she can tell you. Thank you very much. Thank you sir any questions? Okay Lee Howard is next? Hid me, sir. Thank you for having me here tonight. My name is Lee Howard. I'm the owner of Urban Barbecue at 2-0-7, Chapman Avenue, right, Cady Corner to the proposed development. And I'm here tonight to speak in favor of the development. As a business owner and a resident of Rockville for 10 years now, this area has just now starting to see some revitalization that is very encouraging for the city and for the county itself. When we first opened the county projects, you know, right at our line right there, we're not there. And since then it has been, you know, right at our line right there. We're not there. And since then, it has been, you know, very exciting to see what's going on. It's almost like a domino effect. Somebody makes something better. Somebody else wants to be there. You know, evolution of an area is, is and should be, you know, taking place. You can't just stand still. And this is opportunity that the applicant has here is an interesting use of the space, which is easy to say it's self-serving for me saying, I would love to have 600 more units right next door to made possible customers, but just bringing more people to the area, more businesses to the area, more businesses to the area, and just having the opportunity to live closer to where you work. I got to live in Rockville before we opened the restaurant there. My partner and I worked down in Georgetown, and when we had the opportunity to open our own restaurant, the first thing we said was it's gonna be near where we live, and it's less than two miles to where we both live. And that's very important. And we employ 60 to 75 employees between our restaurants and having more available housing around close to where they work. I don't see anything that being beneficial. And I hope you approve their plan and that's all I have to say. Thank you very much. We've always amazed that you built yourself as the world headquarters. It was the first of many. We're still growing, which is open one up in Virginia. Thank you, any questions? Thank you very much. Aaron Fitzgerald is next. I'm here to speak in full favor of it. I've been at my employer for about two years and even in those two years just seeing the area you modernize and more people come to it I think it's been great. I drive to work, I have no problems with my commute. If I'm going to the city for events I do take Metro. That's also fine. I am excited if more people came in because as someone else stated that walk can be a little sketchy at night. So I think having more people around will be great. Yeah, so I'm just in full favor. I think it's a great project. Bring more people is wonderful. And honestly, at the fits, I have not had any noise complaints. So except for from walking my dog behind the back, which I don't do at night. So there it is. OK. Which side of the built the fits you live on? I'm in a courtyard apartment, which I think helps, because we're surrounded. But like I said, even walking on the outskirts, my dog is skittish. And she doesn't even jump. Go for train comes by. And I don't know if it's a way it bounces off the building. OK. Any questions? No. Thank you very much. Cheryl Court, next, please. Good evening. Good evening commissioners. My name is Cheryl Court on the Policy Director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth. We are a regional nonprofit organization focusing on ensuring transportation and development decisions, accommodate growth, revitalizing communities, providing more housing and travel choices, and conserving our natural and historic areas. We've tracked planning and redevelopment around the Twin Brook Metro Station for many years on both the county and city side, and we're very pleased to come to express our support for the 1900 Chapman Avenue Project, and being so close to the metro station. I've looked around this area and I was thought, wow, that's what an uttering-less site. It's really a great redevelopment site. So we're very happy to see plans move forward and we think that this is really appropriately scaled development of multifamily housing at a metro station with a pedestrian oriented design with future option for retail as that as that market. Matures and it doesn't fulfill the intentions and plans of the city for a mixed use district. Replacing these outmoded sort of industrial kinds of uses with a walkable environment. And it's an important contribution to accommodating the demand to live in this area, close to jobs, to services to the red line, and foster a more pedestrian-oriented environment. I wanted to note that we really commend the exciting opportunity of the number of MPD use that will be a part of this project at 15% of the total. That's about just shy of 100 MPD use. Those are important housing opportunities for people who might work in the area, people who have been priced out of the area. And so we think that's a really important contribution that this project is making. And also actually I note the very wide range of bedrooms, that bedroom counts. That's actually something we don't see that often. It's got, I mean, it's a big project, but actually on a density level, it's actually not that many units per acre. But we appreciate this sort of full range of full range of housing needs of various household sizes. I did want to note that the parking supply conforms with the city requirements, but we might want to look at how the city can look at opportunities to reduce parking. Parking really sort of generates more vehicle trips than maybe necessary and look at options for shared parking, for car sharing, for better encouragement of walking transit by really attracting people to this location, marketing it to people who wanna live here, who can live car freefree or car light, and really take advantage of this redeveloping district that will be much more walkable and transit oriented. And something else I just wanted to note was related to transit, the traffic tests is that, the strong focus on these vehicle levels service on rock full pike, widening, adding turnlines and all this kind of thing, that there will be a, there's an impact in terms of pedestrian crossing, in terms of ease of pedestrian crossing, and that it would be good to move from sort of a vehicle level service test to something more like a multimodal vehicle and quality of service test that incorporates all the different modes as places like this, what we want to be a mixed use walkable transitory to district can better address the full set of needs for the district shifting it away from sort of first and foremost, accommodating vehicles to a much more rounded, full approach that really addresses all of the modes and really modes that you want to encourage more because in fact the more folks can walk and offer transit, the fewer vehicle trips you'll be generating. So that's really all I wanted to say we were excited about what we see is the transformation of the area around the Twin Brook metro station and the many sort of industrial uses that for many years I wondered why there wasn't anything it changed here just seemed like such a great opportunity. So I wanted to submit formal comments. How do I do that for this? Just getting to stay. OK, great. Well, thank you very much. Sorry, thank you. One question, yes. Since you're involved at the regional policy level, if you could speak for a moment, if the city is going to be moving in this direction of getting people out of cars and into transit and looking at not only transit, not only road capacity, but transit capacity. Can you offer some kind of vision for how we are going to deal with the overcrowding on Metro? Right. Well, I mean, I think what's important is that if we have everybody move between the hours of seven and eight thirty, we're going to overtax all of our Transparency systems, who would be the roads or transit. So certainly part of the long term solution is to spread peak commute times and also to move more housing to jobs, which is what I think this project represents is that there's a lot of jobs in the area. And so it helps take people out of transit altogether because they might be able to actually walk or bicycle through a job. But in the near term, say the next 10 years, since we don't have a lot of control over what government agencies do for hours of work and such, given how people actually live their lives in terms of having to move around. My concern is that, yeah, we can move people on to Metro, but the Metro capacity has to be there. If the Metro capacity's not there, then none of this, then the smart growth becomes just growth. Sort of, I mean, I agree that we absolutely must reinvest in our Metro system, and it certainly is a much more sustainable way of building the competitiveness of our region than just simply building bigger and bigger roads and subdivisions farther and farther away from where existing communities are. So absolutely, we need to invest in the capacity of our system and also try to shift some of the, take some of those transit trips, for instance, if I couldn't afford to live in Rockville, but I worked near the Twin Brook Metro station. If I could then afford to live because I could get an MPDU, I could walk to work. And so it's a way to shaving those trips off of the roads or a trip that starts out in Silver Spring and ends up at Twin Brook has pushed its way through the center of the system and really sort of overtax the system basically or transfer at Metro Center or gallery play. So investing in our system is absolutely critical but I don't think that we should expect the same way. I don't think we should just continue to build one big arterial and make it put in triple turnlines, all up and down, Rockville Pike. I also think that we, it's not sustainable to just think that we should all live here and all come down town to our jobs. There are the growth in the I-270 corridor in terms of jobs is tremendous. And so even folks who might not even be able to ride transit to work who live here and work in the I-70 quarter are gonna have a shorter trip. It'll reduce overall demand, but getting in reverse commutes is an important part of making the system work better. Okay. Thank you very much. Christina Ginsburg. Good evening. My name is Christina Ginsburg. I live at 1204 Simmons Drive, and I'm here speaking for the Twinbrook Citizens Association, which means I get five minutes. Our experience with this applicant was substantially different from the experience we've had with several other developers who have come to us. We met informally with this applicant, and they did offer to come and meet with the citizens association association but we couldn't work out the timing. What we discussed with the applicant, we were shocked to see that they actually incorporated some of our suggestions. They broke the building into instead of having the monolithic curb to curb that we've seen with so many others. They are preserving the parking, all of the parking, which as you know, the FedRakers and JBG's furniture row got waivers for that, which we did not support those waivers. They are putting in trees. They agreed with us that there would be street entrances on the street two units, which we did not support in the Tuenberg neighborhood plan for totally different reasons, but this is appropriate on this site. And I think there were, and they supported putting on some three bedroom apartments. Now, to characterize this as a a multifamily building is not true. There are still many, many studios and one bedrooms in this, but it was a step in the right direction. So I'm shocked that they did all this and I'm really happy they did all this and I hope this isn't a standard that will be applied to other developments. It certainly wasn't applied to JBG's furniture row development and it wasn't applied to the FUD record development that the mayor and council approved. Now that said, what you hear from neighborhood residents who are here tonight, I think are very important points that need to be considered. This approving things piecemeal is going to catch up with us at some point. We're counting 4,500 units that are already approved, including if this one gets approved tonight, which I think it will be. We're closing, we think, on more than 10,000 units being dumped around the Twinberg Metro. Now, if 10,000 units being dumped around the Twin Brook Metro. Now if 10,000 units appear there, you could fill at least one elementary school and maybe two. And that just doesn't seem to be considered. You're hearing the staff say, oh well, the intersections are failing and we'll just measure it a different way. And oh well, the noise levels are high, but we'll deal with it by saying you can't be out there at night. So magically the noise doesn't matter. This kind of shifting the, the standards is going to catch up with you sooner or later. It's coming now. And I think I'll stop there. We're kind of neutral on this. We're happy that they made changes. We're not happy with the density. I'd be real happy if that project never built the second building. And there was a real park there on this on half of that property. But all in all this this applicant has performed at a much higher level than anything else that we've seen come into this into this area. Now I'm going to digress for a minute the the sound it looks like the sound the discussion about the sound all started after the meeting on July 11th. So I was kind of astounded that you're paying that much attention to it. There is a sound study that was done by the city in 2004 or 2005. It shows that the Lewis Avenue corridor, which of course backs up to the Metro tracks, is one of the noisiest in the city. It was already recognized by the city as being problematic, let's say, six, seven, eight years ago. And part of the issue is that Metro runs those trains through there. And when the houses were built, they were running far fewer trains. CSX runs trains through there. Part of the problem is the sound from the trains will bounce onto solid buildings and will get reflected onto the other side. And where this building is built, it doesn't really matter because on the other side, as you've heard, is an office building. This is going to be an issue that's going to be important when the development gets farther up Rockfield Pike and starts backing on to our houses. And contrary to say that nobody in Twinnbert complains about this, they actually complain bitterly about it. And we spent three years negotiating with CSX because they came through and damaged properties along Lewis Avenue. And we could not come to a resolution with them. And the resolution was CSX saying, well, you're going to have to get an act of Congress to deal with these problems because that's who regulates us. So I'm just putting that out there for you. But while this noise issue seems to be adequately dealt with in this context, it's going to come to be a very big problem in the future. I would also, I think my five minutes are up if I think It's going to come to be a very big problem in the future. I would also, I think my five minutes are up if I think I'm close. I just want to address one thing that happened at the July 11th meeting when somebody pointed out that there was an error and that the re-notifs had to go out. Somebody from the day has asked me if I would waive the requirement for the second notice, and I said no. And going back and thinking about that, I would caution you that I, as a citizen, do not have the right to waver the ability of other people to come up and say their piece. And I think it was improper for that suggestion to come from the Planning Commission that I be asked to make that decision. I don't think I can make that decision. I actually do not think the Planning Commission can make that decision. I think that is a matter of law that the notice requirements have to be adhered to. And I just wanted to make that crystal clear that in the future, if I'm asked that question again, my answer will be this again, the same no. And I think that this body has to recognize that that question cannot be asked at all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Okay. Thank you very much. That's all I have of the folks who signed up, but I'm assuming that at least one person would like to say something else. Brigitte Mollican, 1947 Lewis Avenue on the railroad side. The best thing about I heard all night was about the noise because you can imagine the noise is in my backyard. And yes, people in Turnbrook can hear the noise just like you, Dion. It's not just if you're directly on the railroad that you hear it. And I'm one who does not want a wall anywhere. If you put a wall on this development, then the rest of the neighbors are going to say, why don't we have a wall put up? I said first of all, it's CSX and there's no federal requirement for them to do so. So the noise study discussions here really did cover everything. There is a school directly, state Mary's school, it's directly on the railroad. There's no wall there. So you would not require a wall on this development who's got screening, who's got some woods in between their project. If you go up to St. Mary's you'll see the parking lot right there and there's a church and there's a school and I think Metro had to mitigate the property when they came and took some of the property but I don't know exactly how it was used. First of all I'd like to say that the project has been carefully reviewed and it meets all the requirements of the zoning. The applicant is providing pedestrian access to and through the site at a 10-foot wide sidewalk along Chapman and a 6-foot wide sidewalk along Thompson. I'm all for that. All this is in your report. What hasn't been mentioned that I like is the bicycle lockers. There was 55 for the building one in 57 for building two. I was a big advocate when I was on a planning commission for bikes and that they're going to have the lock covered bicycle rooms. I think that's fantastic. There was some great testimony tonight from others here and I echo everything except anything that was made negative. On the negative side, I just want to say I'm speaking for an individual and I do not believe that the Tuberks citizen association ever represents me. There has not been any discussion of a big large group that Christina may be testifying on. There may be eight people at the most that come to these meetings. And I do object when they come up here and speak for the entire community. As far as the the transformers, I think that the reasons given why they want the waiver is adequate. You all know that requirement. It was great to hear a resident who was also a business owner that's for this. It was great to hear the woman from Fritz say that she lives along the railroad and it's not an issue, especially her dog doesn't have a problem with it. The other thing I'd like to say about all the discussions and questions you ask, the trains run on the weekends, the freight trains run on the weekends. They are loud. Let me tell you, my house shakes when they come by. I guess the big issue here is exterior noise and it's continuous and there's no federal law that says that anything else has to be done. Some of my neighbors along the railroad want more trees and some don't. I don't have a problem with a building, seeing a building through the fence to Rockville Pike. I tend to believe in smart growth and I think a lot of good discussions were made. Parking, guess what? There are parking meters on Lewis Avenue right by the Metro and guess what? They're all empty. They're not being used. Traffic will always be a problem. And again, if there are shifts in these businesses having options of work at home, flex time, all these things can help. The big problem is Metro can't accommodate the need, and that is a funding issue. If anything, we need more funds, we need more trains more often, and that's the big key is funding. Transportation funding is the big issue. I think this developer has done a great job. I also welcome this development. I think it's great to have more people in our neighborhood and it is not a negative at all. I don't have a problem with identity. I think that having rentals for new people to come in, they will hopefully have jobs, and they'll eventually buy our houses. And Trimbrick houses have not gone down because of development. I think it shows me what my value of my property is. When you figure out how much it costs to live in some of these units. And as was said, theD use is a great asset 100 units for MPD use is fantastic. So yeah my support my question is do I need to write additional comments do you need to be in writing or will this be a support for the record Do I need to submit anything I'm writing? I want to submit anything but I don't think you don't need anything like but it's not necessary Okay, anyway, I'm very supportive of this and I welcome it. Thank you. Thank you for getting questions I would well I would just like to make a general comment as echoing Mr. Tuhan that if speakers would stay on the positive and not criticize the folks have spoken before them, it would keep things on a positive note. Thank you. Okay. Is there anyone else in the room who would care to speak on this application? Saying none, we will close this portion of our meeting and it's discussion time. Mr. colleagues. Can I just say one thing, which is usually the way I wrap this up which is we have reviewed the conditions that are in the staff report and then we find that they're all acceptable. And that we ask you that you find make the finding for the transform above ground transformer and that you accept that you find justification for the deviation from the environmental guidelines on whatever conditions that you deem acceptable to impose. Thank you. I believe we've heard a closing argument. Are we going to have time for our questions of the applicant? Yes. Okay. We can redo that if you'd care to do that. I didn't think we'd really gotten to that. We had a couple questions trying trying not to inter-up their presentation. Okay. Go ahead, Kate. All right. Well, I guess I'd like to hear the applicant's discussion of why this is the intersection that you're mitigating. And that's many other ones that are failing and continue to fail, especially on your traffic council. You know it's kind of interesting when you do eight intersections and you do the calculations and you come up technically to not make an impact on any of them of at least 1%. And that's not taking into consideration any improvements that any prior developments are supposed to do. We don't consider that they're going to make those improvements but we put their trips in our background. So we're looking at worst case situation with a number of trips and we're not taking advantage that some of the prior approved projects are actually going to do improvements to other intersections. And we look at the worst case scenario and technically we didn't come up to point to 10 to 1 percent. And so I have to say, Hein stepped up and said, we'll do this intersection, that we'll round up and do the intersection so that there's a physical traffic improvement that we will make to one of these eight intersections. So they just stepped up to the plate. If I could. I'm Carl Starker. I'm a traffic consultant for Hines. If we go to that same page 7-4. 7-4? 7-4. And if we look at intersection number three, there are two parts to the analysis. The first part is a critical lane volume number. Okay? And if we look at the background, and we see the number of 1858, okay? And we look at the total, 1865. That's an increase. It represents an impact. Okay? That's the first part of the test. Okay? The second part is the VC ratio. If we look at all the other intersections, they state the same or they went down because of the trip credits based on the prior use. So in a case where the COB stayed the same or went down, that meant we had no impact. But in a case where we increased the COB, that introduced an impact. So that's why we stepped up to the plate. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I was just looking at the VC ratio. So thanks for pointing that out. Okay, that makes sense. My other traffic question was, did I read correctly in here that there's only gonna be on street parking on Chapman on the north side of the private the Peseo you're calling it I think or did I misread that I was on page there is some there is on street parking and drop off spots on the Peseo on part of on part of Chapman near the north building not not near the intersection of Twin Brook and Chapman, there is none in front of the South Building. So the street parking that's currently there will go away? Yes. Some of it, yes. You pushed farther down. Correct. Away from the intersection. Down to Ward Thompson and further. Correct. Closer to the South. So there'll be a loss of street parking. One of the conditions had to do with, sorry, from the throw these papers. It was on the sidewalk may allow a, I think that's it. Where you may allow a tree lawn. I was wondering why that wouldn't just be required on that portion where there is no street parking. I'm sorry. What page are you on? Because I'm looking in the staff report at the end of there where they list them all together. Are you in the transportation section? Because that's not traffic. It's page 625. Oh, yeah. I'm page 25, condition number 15. The applicant should provide hardscape a long time. Senate Chetman, when there is no parallel parking on the streets, the applicant will be permitted to provide a tree lawn. It will be a continuous tree soil panel there. It's just that when you have parallel parking and you open in your door, we're going to put hardscape on top of the tree soil panel so that when you step out, you're not stepping out into the mulch. And where there's not parallel parking, we will actually have it look like what you see is a tree lawn with lawn. Okay, so the soil will be continuous. It's just that there will be papers on the surface where there's parallel parking so you can step out of your car onto a hard surface. Okay, so when it says permitted, I mean basically there will be a tree lawn in the area where there's no correct. Absolutely. Yes. All right. Just so that's understood. Yes. I guess one of my other questions is why are you not building this to the maximum height and reducing the parking as we see so often. I'm not saying I'm advocating that by any means, but I was just curious because we don't usually see that. I guess the general question, the general answer is that they think it's an appropriate scale for this location. It provides the ability at five stories over the podium, the concrete first floor, the most reasonable construction cost, which will translate into some of the most reasonable rents, because they are not high-rise construction costs translating into high-rise rents. They are a long-term owner. They're anticipating this to be rental property. So all of those things go towards their long term as a long-term owners interest to make sure this is a successful project. It stays full and that it's cost-effective to construct so that you can get underway immediately and that it's cost-effective to operate. Okay. Just a couple of questions about the site planning and such. How is the recycling in trash gonna be done? I mean, it's a try-sorter. There's a try-sorter on the by floor. There's a try-sorter at the rear. At one of the elevator banks of each floor and that try-sorter allows someone when they take their trash out to also do their recycling at the same time, it will divided up, send it down into the trash room and then that recycling will be taken out by the management staff on recycling day to the loading talk. Okay. So it's provided on each level. Same place for all the stuff you bring out. Okay. And so you'll have a private company doing it. It won't be city garbage trucks again. I can't imagine that it will be. Yes. Okay, city doesn't provide it for multi-family. Right. And there were some problems in some places. Okay, and the maintenance of the private drive is done by. By the owner. Okay. This is Zipcar here anywhere. We don't have one planned. Oh they're at the metro. They're parked at the metro. Okay so there is one at Twinbrook. I wasn't sure I couldn't remember. And the slope between this project and Twinbrook Parkway. How is that gonna be treated? I mean, the trees there are gonna be taking out the trees. Most of that slope actually belongs to Montgomery County. They own that parcel and fee, the hill. Okay. So the flat area is the limits of our property. When they built the overpass, they just take the whole thing. So we're not touching it. Okay. And what about the retaining wall this there? It must be at least in the back part. That's on there. That's at the edge of the property. That's at the property line, basically. So you're going to be blessed with keeping that. And what is? There is. Oh, at the metro on the back or on the side. If you're in the tracks. There's a higher retaining wall. Yeah, it must be the least eight foot concrete wall. Does that stay? Retaining wall. Well, I don't know if it's a retaining wall or whatever it is, but it's a big concrete wall right in the back corner. Yeah, the one that's parallel to Twin Brook is not on our property in stays. The ones along the track, we're building up the land behind it, so it will look less of a retaining wall because we're actually adding. So some of your trees in front of that retaining that big concrete wall are you gonna be that's gonna be planted by you even though the wall stays? Yes because of whatever's on our property we're planting. Okay. All right I was hoping that could come down maybe. As for the building themselves in one of the renditions you've had and some of I was hoping that could come down maybe. As for the building themselves, in one of the renditions you've had and some of the stuff we have here, it looks like there's walls that are jutting out kind of perpendicular to the building face. And I'm just curious what that's going to do to light coming into the apartment windows. How's that been looked at? What's happened with that? Hi, my name is Federico Rivera-Sala with SKNI, the architect. Those perpendicular, mostly masonry, pieces are accents to show in some cases the entrances, the units are in some cases the units and they don't be too much, so there's not going to be any major impact into enlightening. Basically, it's a single piece that comes out, so only a half hour during the day will have some impact, but it doesn't say it in front. So it's only the shadow will be diagonally to the facade. So basically, the impact is very minimal. Okay. It's fairly typical balconies, what you think, you know, typically are, you know, 3 feet deep or whatever. It was hard to tell. Basically, it would be this less impact than if you imagine a bay window, because a bay window is, it's a volume that sticks out and it has more, more surface to project shadow. This is only, it's, it's one blade in a way. So the shadow is minimal. And there are about three feet, Margaret said? Yeah. In some cases when they are bigger, when they are holding the balconies at the corner, they are hollow. Basically, it's like a an arc, if you will. So it's not a huge solid piece. Okay. thank you. And where is the parking or how do people get to the parking who have the street level entrances? Did they park on the street or do they just go into the garage and come back out? How does that work? They can, the residents can park in the garage and they have two entrances to their units so they can either enter through the interior of the building or the exterior of the building. Back door. That's cool. Okay. And just, I had never heard of a junior one bedroom apartment before. What is the definition of that one? It's a small one bedroom. It's not a studio. It's larger than a studio. It is a unit that has a sleeping alcove. So, 550 square feet. Yeah, it's mostly, it's a name that we call units that are smaller than the regular typical, which is basically 700 to 750 square feet for one bedroom. We have units that are slightly smaller. We call them junior. So the bedroom? In some cases is a legit one bedroom. In some cases is an outcome that is integrated to one bedroom. In some cases is an outcode that is integrated to this. Okay, so sometimes they're more like a studio because there's no door on the bedroom but sometimes there's a bit but really it's just a much worth of foot. Most of the time there is a door but it's it's it's a different type of door. Maybe it's a barn door that you can leave it open if you want so it's the space is integrated. You can you can use also a Murphy bed so you can leave it open if you want so it's the space is integrated. You can use also a Murphy bed so you can integrate your bedroom and your living room as just one whole space when you have privacy just enclosed that with a barn door. Okay. Thank you. And I gather one of my questions was I think you said the first floor ceiling height is 15 feet. Okay. And what's the dimensions of the central plaza in the other public area? It is. It has 1,820 square feet. This is the cutout in the north building that makes that public plaza right at the Paseo and the and it's not the the street it's the cut out is 1820 square feet it's 67 feet by 20 feet. Okay. Right and I don't know if you could see through the pictures but one of the interesting things is right at that cut out the main entrance to the building is there. And if you look up, all of the hallways for each of the floors are in a glass enclosed closure. So you can actually, there's light that allows you to look straight through their hallway into the courtyard that's beyond. So. I will add, sorry, I didn't have time to mention this before, but the courtyards are on the second floor of the project and they will have extensive green roofs which will have ornamental trees so you can actually see straight through the lobby with the glass entrance into the courtyard and see the trees at a second level. So, I'll be kind of a cool architectural feature. And those court yards are huge I mean the largest ones are 112 feet by 94 feet so that's huge about 10,000 square foot just one of those court yards and there's four up there. And would you be willing I mean it sounded like you would put a condition in here that there will be some sort of form that tenants you know that the people living there will sign saying that they're on the railroad track in case we would definitely agree to a condition that would require us to notify our tenants before they sign the lease. Okay that'd be great. That's it. Thank you. Okay. Done. Are there any occupant or tenant activities on the roofs of the building? All right. That's it. Thank you. Okay. Done. Are there any occupant or tenant activities on the roofs of the building? Not on the roofs per se in those court yards. The court yards are the roof on the podium level. I'm just kidding. No, I mean the roof roof. Yeah. That's all. Okay. In the slide you had up a minute ago that showed the exterior of the building. I'm a lot next to it. Could we take a, there you go. Yeah. You got the, right. The green area there. That's not going to actually look like that. Well, what we're showing here is those are the street trees. And there are street trees on the tree lawn on the outside. And there are some trees that are along where the building along the building face, the future building face. And the rest of that is green grass. It's a lawn. Okay. Because in your staging project phasing, it says a temporary parking lot. Yes. There is a there is a small parking lot There, oh, but it's not going to be the whole surface parking. There is a small surface parking lot on the far side of that near the Metro tracks on that side and the idea being that in order to get this least up and to do whatever we need to do to start off to make sure the first building is successful to do whatever we need to do to start off to make sure the first building is successful. We want a little bit of surface parking to make sure that everyone feels comfortable, goes into the leasing office, gets leased up. And we figured that it would be a great place later to actually program it for the community. If you wanted to do a little, you'd have a little bit of asphalt there that you could program it to do, you know, whatever the... My real question is how long before the second building and will those trees ever get to that height? I can't tell you when the second building is other than the way your site plan process works, the validity period for multi-building requires us to commence construction in eight years. So, you're going to plant those trees. Yes. And they'll be growing. They'll plant grass and that'll be there. A small parking lot in the back. And then at some point within eight years you'll start construction. The trees will remain and then you'll dig a hole in the ground behind them. Correct. Okay. And whether some of them need to be protected and move the ones next to the building need to be moved temporarily while the construction goes on that may happen but the idea is to have that streetscape look good as soon as possible. I would also point you to condition 4, which requires that they submit a phasing plan for how they intend to stage the different things. So even though they have the parking lot for the phase 1 to kind of accommodate the extra, what happens when you build phase 2? Where do the construction workers park? Where do you know, it would spell out all of that. And that would be standard for the last two. Where did the construction workers park where do you know it would spell out all of that. And that would be standard. And is the parking distributed roughly equally between the two buildings? Each building has sufficient parking to stand on its own. Okay. Any other questions of the applicant? Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions of the applicant? Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, who would like to start? Don, would you care to discard? Discussion. I send you a direct in your. But it's a move. What I'm collecting my thoughts. I don't have any technical objections to the project and lawd a and the pace in which it's been considered and developed on a community basis and on a planning basis with staff and with the city. I am aware, as I think most of us are, that we have a pace of development and of growth that's going on here. And the comments that we have forward sight to what we're filling up and what the impact is, including the impact on adjacent neighborhoods. We have zoning in place. Our presence here is not to change the scope of what's been planned for the city, but to work within the bounds of what we have. And within those bounds, I'm, this is in the vernacular. I'm okay with this project. I'm very much aware of issues of traffic and parking and the fact that neighborhoods can be divided and there needs to be a Comming influence on finding what are called best solutions even though people are always going to disagree So that's general background I would be in favor of providing the waiver for above ground or partially above ground Units in the back. I think there are two conditions that we've talked about adding one of which deals with the sound issue and what might show up as least disclosures for tenants in there. And as part of that also an issue as to whether we're going to vary from what the otherwise applicable sound reduction requirements would be. I agree I can't see a wall being in there. And I also agree that the uses of the six-year space are intermittent as is the sound. And I don't think we want to be in the position of having a like a real-ed crossing person there who waves a flag every time a freight train is coming up, so people will avoid the path or get off of it or clutch their dogs ears or whatever Not to make light of it But I mean the the sound issue as it goes up the pike as has been pointed out is going to remain an issue And it's going to be a variable issue. So on the one hand, I don't want to have blinders on and not pay attention to what the future impact might be of our decision tonight Another hand, I think for reasons stated I want to have blinders on and not pay attention to what the future impact might be of our decision tonight. Another hand, I think for reason stated, different properties and their uses, their proximity to the right of way for Metro and CSX. And the correlation of that with the impact on the OS Lewis Avenue properties across the way. I mean, we just, we have to continue this discussion on a project by project basis. And, you know, we're not going to get an easy way out within easy, within easy answer. So with those comments, I'm prepared to vote in favor of the project and particularly to underscore the fact that it's not just a saying to say that this has been scaled to the use and the realities in the market of the project. It's, I think that's a great slogan for the city, not literally a slogan, but the idea that we have a developer who's taken pains to do what for a lot of reasons can be determined to be right as opposed to optimize or maximize intensity. That, you know, what we're looking at is the scale of what the city is going to be like five and ten and more years down the road. And I appreciate that. Amen, brother. Thanks. Comments? Don, you said pretty much when I was where I'm at. Okay. My colleague is very eloquent and I very much appreciate that the developer here has worked with the community in designing this. I think that's not always been the case in Rockville and so it's appreciated. I also much appreciate can always argue that you should put maximum density around the metro and that's important up to a point, but it needs to be balanced with sort of a community feel and a human scale. I mean, and so I appreciate that very much about this project. And since I was sort of the one to really clamor the bell about the noise issue, I do think that that's something that we need to be careful of because part of building environmentally sustainable development is not subjecting our new residents to environmental pollution and public health risks. I'm going to trust that the new building technologies that have developed is not going to put residents at any risk because living right next to the railroad is, Jan has said, even living a mile away. And I live about a mile away. And I hear the train at night. It's something we're going to have to deal with as we are. It seems like we're just building a lot of stuff right on the railroad. And so we do need to look at this site by site, obviously, you know, a wall is not going to be practical here. And, but again, my concern is that the city doesn't end up bearing the cost down the line of any mitigation. I know that sometimes we've gotten a year or two or three into a project and there's costs that show up. And unless it's in a condition in a use permit, then the city is stuck with it, moving phone poles or whatever. And so I'm going to trust that the legal eagles here have taken a look at. Sorry, your question to me was, would the city be responsible? In other words, legally responsible? Financially, in a bind to where we get past the point, right now, any noise mitigation is the responsibility, financial responsibility of the developer. According to what I read in the noise guidelines that we've incorporated, that when the noises is like a freeway or an external source and somebody builds something, that noise mitigation is the financial responsibility of the developer, I don't want it to fall on the city a couple of years from now as a result of whatever. I want us to deal with it up front. That's not a legal responsibility if it happened down the road as a result of this application. That would be something that was a decision made by the city to if there was public complaint possibly. I don't know that there's a legal reason why we would be repart, the city would be required to build a wall in years to come. I don't think that was what you're asking me. Well, it was part of what, I mean, I was asking you illegally would, would our waving the wall now put us in any legal jeopardy down the line. Not that I'm aware of, but I don't know what laws are created down the line. I can't answer that. That would cause the city to build this wall. Right now as it stands, if the Planning Commission decides to wave the requirement, there's no requirement that I'm aware of that requires the city to build such a wall. That was what I thought you was asking you really a couple of years from now, if there's litigation from the residents about it, and the developer is no longer in the position of having financial responsibility, would the city for health and safety reasons ever be put in a position where it had to build a sound wall? Well, I can't speculate as to what the laws are in several years, but I know that I don't believe that the city owns any land there. I understand that the county owns land and the developer owns land, so I don't know how the city would be responsible to build anything on land that it does not own. But anyway, general comments, I think this is a well-conceived project with those caveats in mind and maybe some signs. I wouldn't go so far as to put it in conditions. That was their option for it. To let people know that it's going to get pretty noisy if they're out there for any period of time. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. John, how much? Hey. I will be happy to vote for this project. When I first started on the Planning Commission, one of my then much more experienced colleagues said that they thought probably the worst example of development in Rockville, maybe outside of the original mall, was the sim site. It is a really excellent example of how not to use land for a number of ways. So, you know, I, and I'm not always, you know, jumping up and down for all the mixed-use projects we've seen come in, some of them I think probably could have been designed to be. This one looks really good to me. I mean, I like the design of it. I'm not an architect, but what I can see on paper them I think probably could have been designed to be out. This one looks really good to me. I mean, I like the design of it. I'm not an architect, but what I can see on paper, I think you've done a really good job. I congratulate you on that. I understand the concerns of Ms. Goodman, Mr. Farley, the other citizens that are concerned about growth in general, metro capacity, all those things. I share those same concerns. I've watched the growth where I live too. It's many, many people are concerned about it. But if we're going to put it anywhere, I think this is the place. And if we're going to address those bigger issues, that has to be done through changing our zoning code. And, you know, the master plans and things like that. Right now we're dealing with a single project that is working within the parameters of our current laws and master plans and it meets all of those criteria. The one thing that I think was brought up is a slight deviation from the master plan is that, you know, the Rockville Pike Plan in 1989 wants more ground floor retail that this doesn't have. And there's been a lot of debate about that as we were rewriting the new zoning code and in other forums. And I think in the staff report, and in the case that the applicant was making, I think there's a lot of retail within two blocks of there in any direction. And I think putting more teeny tiny little shops isn't necessarily going to be viable or even necessary. There's going to be several grocery stores within blocks of this for one thing. You've got more bookstores and more other retail and urban barbecue. And I have a second side of the Mercado. I mean they're branching out here. As for the sound, freight trains are really loud. As someone who lived smack on top of a freight line, two freight lines actually that cross somewhere in the Midwest, so there were a lot of trains. And in a house that was, I don't know how old it was, but it had housed an underground railroad station. So it was pretty old. It shook. It was loud. And if you don't want to live there forever, you're probably going to move. I think in terms of putting a sound barrier in the back, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. In terms of trying to restrict people from walking back there, because for 40 minutes out of 24 hours, there's going to be a freight train coming by. Also, it doesn't make any sense. If people don't want to be there, they'll figure that out. It's not ideal, but this is where our metro stations are. They're on the freight lines there, too. I mean, I don't think there's a good solution. And as for your concern that people are going to rise up and want to sound while, is the people on Lewis Avenue, who have been hammered by this for 50 years, disagree on whether they want one or not, even if you could talk CSX into it. I'm not too worried about that. I do support the disclosure for the residents. And it's for the waiver for the transformer, which I guess we have to act on separately. I mean, support of that. That's fine. I do have a question. Sure staff. Did they have, did they not have to comply with the art in public spaces requirement? Yes they do. It is in here. Okay, my apologies. A comment. Thank you, thank you, thank you for not asking for a parking waiver. Because I totally came here today expecting a fight. And I say that because, and this is completely, maybe ignorant of me, but as a resident, I just don't buy into the whole force me to take public transportation at night when we're trying to go into the city not that I'm important but 40 minutes for a train that's ridiculous I also hope in this none of my business but you do not charge for parking again that's none of my business but as a savvy young somewhat resident. I would do anything to not pay parking. If that means parking on the streets, parking on my neighbors, closer driveways, whatever it would take. And I'm not a chicken little, same sky's fallen, just it is what it is. So thank you for not asking for parking a waiver reduction. That's it. I appreciate those domain comments. Yes. A couple of us lived 600 yards from tracks. Somebody lived 60 feet from the track. So we know about it. I think it's a very good project from having looked at that piece of property from the time that it was a printing plant. It took the citizens' association 15 years to get it out of there because the state didn't cooperate. And a plan very similar to this almost 20 years ago was put in place, but funding wasn't available to do it. And Sims was very smart doing what they were doing because they knew all about the distress oil, let's say. But I think you've done a very good job compared to what you had the first time around on this. And I think the bigger issues this commission is struggling with on everything else we do. Take a look at a bigger picture, not just what's in Rockville, but it's coming around Rockville. Those issues we are now on our 27th work session for Rockville Pike, 23rd, 34th, whatever. And there's a lot of issues that we're trying to deal with because most of those impact the Twinbrook neighborhood and the Hungerford neighborhood and others. So we're very cognizant of what we can do. But as my colleagues have said, those folks who own property, we have a zoning ordinance and we have to go by what's in the zoning ordinance. It can get adjusted when needed, but that's what we're working with. So I think a project's well done and I agree with all of you, I think the waivers are certainly the cases been made for them. So with that I'll entertain a motion from somebody who can remember to bring all the findings and all the conditions and all the waivers together. Do we act first on the units? Is that incorporated? Do we have to do a separate waiver and finding estimate? I think you ought to do the underground or not underground transformers separately. Do the separate bits and pieces, then do on activate, do action on the whole. Okay, well on the condition that the rest of the plan winds up being approved. So I don't want to approve the transformer if we do the rest of the project. We do the transformers afterwards. We do it afterwards. The site plan generally. Okay, well then I will move. After you have the right site plan number. That the Commission approved site plan application STP 2012-00112 for 1900 Chapman Avenue, including that we adopt the findings that are said forth in the staff report. 21 through 24. Well, those right. Conditions later. And that we adopt the conditions that are offered in the staff report. Number 21 through 34. And that's one through 34. I'm sorry if I misspoke one through 34. Yes, conditions numbered one through four. That's correct. And then we need to add at least one condition. And that is that the leases for tenants of the building include, I'll say do notification so that you can work that with staff of the proximity of the project to the CSX and Metro line. Did you want the leases to say it or to them to be notified? Well, first the leases. Okay. And not as part of the motion, but as a side comment, I think we're prepared to say that signage could be something they can do on the run that we don't need to put a condition in for that. Yeah. So that would be condition number 35. Metro and CSX. Correct. And I was. The first. The mitigation is number 25 already. No, I'm sorry about the noise comes from. Oh, you're. I'm sorry. No, it's. No, it's. The post and the of CSX and Twinberg Park. OK. Because that was in the noise report. And then number 36, unless we need to make this a separate motion afterwards, is that they be relieved from any requirement to mediate a noise level by a wall or other means. That would be a condition that be a motion as part of the resolution. I said that'll be a second. Okay, so I withdraw that. Okay. Do I have a second motion? You want me to repeat it? I think we got it. Move and second motion. You want me to repeat it? I think we got it. Moving seconded. Any further discussion? All in favor of the motion? Say aye. Aye. And the chair votes aye. Chair Prutim votes aye. Okay, now we have two waivers to think about. I move the motion. Yeah, I'll move that we waive the requirement for undergarance, the transformers. Mr. Chair, can I just offer some language to comply with the ordinance? Yes. The ordinance required section 25, 17,03. C of the zoning ordinance provides that upon finding that installing utility equipment within in closed building is not feasible, the Planning Commission may make grant a waiver of any requirement of this section for any of the following reasons. A, a unique or particular site condition provides a physical impediment to installing equipment underground or it would be unsafe to locate the equipment underground or the equipment cannot successfully operate below ground. So it really has two prongs. The first prong is you have to find that installing utility within a closed building is not feasible. And then the second part would be you have to find one of those three reasons. I think number two, because it's, you know, the ground is unsuitable, needs to be remained undisturbed. So, not that you couldn't physically do it, but it's a unique site condition as well, as well as unsafe places. Right. One and two. Is that right? Right. The A and B are one and two. A and B. Okay. Well, that's it. Okay. It's motion is includes the legal ease there. And conditions one and two. And B. And B. First two or whatever. I get this right here. Okay. I will second that moved and the first two or whatever. I'll get this right here. Okay. I will second that. Move to seconded any further discussion? All in favor say aye. All right. I'm sure for 10 votes aye. And one last one. They have you. The attorney had it as a fourth option. I've got or degrade anywhere. Is that in here anywhere? The finding that you need to make according to the environmental standard. You might want to add to this is that deviations from these guidelines may be allowed when it can be satisfactorily demonstrated that strict compliance would unreasonably impact development of the site or undermine other environment or planning considerations. So looking to see where. So we would find is that a finding? Yes. We need to make that as a finding. Yeah, you have to you have to state why it's been demonstrated that strict compliance would be unreasonable Why would it be unreasonably impacted? Well, I think a sound hole would certainly be a negative impact on this development. I'll move that we, tell me the magic word from the, are we waiving or we? TV eating. I think you gave you this. We're all deviants today. I thought they, in the report, they had risk. You had language, the environmental guidelines say unreasonably impact development or undermine other. That's not good. So I'll move that we deviate from the environmental requirement. And specifically, we're not requiring that a sound wall be installed because that dot dot. We find that it would have an adverse impact upon the development of the project and the area, both in its height, its dimension, its aesthetics. It's aesthetics and it's really failure to correspond to the degree of the noise situation that's there. It'd be overkill. All right. It sounds nicely. We have a second on that. Second. Move the second at any further discussion. Yeah, there is something that you had included as your fourth option. No, our fourth option was to allow the path to go forward and just to approve a deviation. Basically, you said to approve a deviation from the environmental guidelines on the justification that there were other planning considerations that allowed you to go forward without, and it's environmental or planning considerations because we gave you both. We gave you why the wall doesn't work and what the noise impacts were and all that. So I would just follow that language that's in the environmental guidelines that that's the finding that you made. So found. It's been moved and seconded. We've had a little further discussion. All in favor? I find it high. I go with I. Okay. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much. I particularly thank the gentleman from the official name but I kept the last one vibrations. It's very good. Phoenix. Phoenix, good. Okay. I think we might take a wee break. So do you want to take a wee break? All right. I'll be back. Five minute break. We need more figuratively. Five minute break. Can't ever see the clock anymore. be back. Five minute break. Five minute break. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right, ladies and gentlemen, all ships at sea. We thank you for tuning back into us for planning commission meeting 18-12 we are continuing on our next item on our agenda which is PLT-12 record plan to create a record lot containing 25,000 514 square feet on a deeded property located at 369 Hungerford Drive in the MX CD zone, the former gas station. Madam, please continue there, Nicole. Thank you for the record. My name is Nicole Walters. That's a tough act to follow from the last application, but I'll keep it short and sweet for this one. Bollard Engineering on behalf of the property owner at 369 LLC wishes to take the presently deed at lot and turn it into a record lot. The applicant is intending to lease the site and develop it with a bank. During the preliminary review of the site plan application or the pre-application process, we will deem the review of that site plan once submitted as a level one site plan, which will be approved by the junior planning. Just give you some basic information on the site. To the north, we have the railroad and will model right away site to the east MX CD to south MX CD into the west MX CD The subject properties located in planning area one the town center area and subject to the Rockville town center master plan The recommended land use in TCMP is for public park but recording of the plat at this time is not in conflict with the recommendation. No portion of the property has ever appeared on a record plat of the subdivision. Its ownership has always been transferred by deeds containing needs and bounds description. Once properties recorded on the plat of subdivision, the property complies with requirements for area and frontage. Once the platters are recorded, on a platter subdivision, it becomes a billable lot. The property meets the definition of the minor subdivision because it creates no more than three lots. Does not involve the extension of municipal facilities or road extensions and will not affect the development of the adjoining properties and is not conflict with the plan. As proposed, the plot contains one lot having approximately 200 feet of frontage on hunger for drive while exceeding the lot with requirement. As with regards to the APFS, that will be reviewed during the site plan process. And again, as previously mentioned, the appropriate authority in this case will be the chief of planning. The mail notification was provided to all residents and property owners within the required 750 square foot radius. No posting of the sign was required on the property. To date staff has not received any written or verbal comments regarding this application. And in closing staff fines that the slot meets the requirements of the zoning ordinance and recommends approval. We weren't happy to answer any questions that you may have. Okay. Any questions that are clarifying nature of staff? Please. Yes, sir. John? I'm trying to get my microphone here. On page four, regarding master plan recommendation. We learn that the recommended land use under center master plan is for public park. And on page five we have the statement in the first paragraph that starts on that page that it will not affect the development of the property of the adjoining properties and is not in conflict with the plan. And I need help in reconciling. You see their park or it isn't park. How do we how do we do that? In our view, the public park recommendation was as based on an assumption in the master plan that talks about widening of the 355 right-of-way. Right, I saw that. And if that were to take place, the expectation would be that the right-of-way would come from the eastern properties, properties on the east side of 355, and ultimately would render them likely unbuildable due to their lack of depth between the 355 right away and the rail right away. So that was the genesis of the park recommendation. That is in the master plan. The land use plan shows park recommendation, but this kind of a caveat as to why that recommendation is in place. But the land doesn't have to be held in suspense until it's determined whether 355 will be widened. It's a privately owned lot now. I don't see how we could hold the land in suspense if there are no plans to no concrete plans to widen 355. I mean, would it be more accurate to say, rather than say that it's not in conflict with the plan, that based on the same baguity, this possible future contingency, that it's not in conflict at this time. I would say that's probably more technically correct. Yes. But then if this was to go forward as proposed, then the law has approved, well, I guess it would still be subject to taking. If 350, yeah, okay. Correct. I'm fine. The action really is to make it a recordable law. I understand. I understand. Yeah. Jack. And if something, even when something is actually built on there, is that reviewed by somebody? Yes. As Nicole explained, the chief of planning is the approving authority for the proposal that we've seen for this property. Is there any thought? I noticed that with my novice stature in the Rockville Pike Plan, no longer. When we were looking at the streetscape, south of this area, a lot when we were looking at the street scape, south of this area, you know, a lot had to do with what could fit between buildings that were pre-existing. Just anticipating that at some point, we might be looking at street scape along this area. Will you be taking into account when the actual building is built? The setback from the road so that the building would be consistent with future streetscape visions. Do you understand what I'm saying? There is a built-to line that exists on this side of 355 in this location. So it would be consistent with that built-to line like the fits maintain that. Okay. So other adjacent things this won't be sitting further out in the roadway than the other things in that block. No. OK. Thanks. Any comments? Questions of the staff? I'm just wondering when the last bank was being proposed. The Bank of America was going to be moved here. That was a temporary trailer. So it wasn't going to need a plaque. Well, anything that you were to build on it you would need. So the reason we never saw a plan at that point is because that just never happened and it fell through. It was just a temporary construction trailer wasn't it? Well I never went there. Yeah it was never just temporary right never happened. So we didn't okay. Okay. Okay. May we hear from the applicant? We don't have to, but I just thought since you're here. This is going to be nice to hear from you. I don't represent Boller Engineering and I don't represent the propryon or I represent PNC Bank. So we are part of the project for the record Suley Cho with a lot of them, a filler, Miller, and Cambie. I'm here to just answer questions. I didn't plan to present anything. Obviously it came to a surprise for us, PNC Bank, when we found out that we had just signed a long-term ground lease on a property that was not buildable. So. Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. I didn't really think. Well, it was something that was discovered in the process. And hopefully we'll be shortly ratified. OK. Anybody else in the room would care to speak about this particular application. Seeing none. Discussion time, people, for this technical adjustment. No discussion? I'll entertain a motion. I'll move approval of final record plat, PLT 2012-00518. Move and seconded. the LT 2012-00518. Moving seconded. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Vote aye. 2. 4-0. Thank you all. Our next item. What? That's great. Next item on our agenda is one of our favorite sorts of projects. PRJ2012-11702 Amanda Tory referral application 51 Manica Street are on Cumbria College and Cass if you will Take over for us, please Yes, sir Mr. Chairman good evening. What's the planning commission? per ten for ten What I'd like to do basically is just give the planning commission a brief introduction about this mandatory referral application and it kind of go into the overview of the project. The application is being processed as a mandatory referral in accordance with Apple, State Law governing the construction of public buildings and structures. While it has been determined that an agent, I'll sort of get it, well, it has been determined that an agent, well, it has been determined that as an agency of the state, the college is not subject to the City of Rockville's zoning regulations. They are, however, subject to the mandatory referral process. The City of Rockville's review of this mandatory referral is to determine consistency with the City's master plan as to find out an article 66B, section one of the annotated quote of Maryland, specifically as it relates to location, character, and extent of the proposal. The existing science west building was originally constructed in 1971 and accordance with use permit U-43069 approved by the Planning Commission on April 1, 1969. The existing science-wrestling is approximately 41,980 square feet, two stories in the height and today consists of instructional classroom and lecture space. The building is located in the southwest quadrant of the 86-acre college campus. The proposal, the renovation of the science-based building that represents the third and final phase of the development of the school science engineering and mathematics, mathematics complex on the rockville campus. The new science center building completed in 2011 was the first phase. The renovation of the science east Building is the second phase. Under the proposed renovation, the building has been designed to provide academic and administrative space which is intended to enhance both the learning and teaching, experience of students and faculty alike. As noted in the project proposal, the creation and establishment of the science engineering and mathematics complex is in keeping with one of the many goals of the colleges facilities and master plan. As part of this proposed renovation and modernization of the existing science was building, a third floor comprising 20,994 square feet will be constructed, representing the expansion element of this project. The scope of work for this renovation includes the following. Removal of all of the exterior building walls of the science-west building, construction of the third level, this new third level for the building. Reconstruction of the pedestrian bridge between the science-west and science-east buildings that currently connects those to classroom buildings. Employment, ADA and lighting upgrades to the pedestrian bridge and lastly complete replacement of the buildings and mechanical, electric plumbing and fire protection technology systems. Associated site improvements include the following. Installation and enhanced pedestrian walkways and paths, new crosswalks, outdoor seating areas, which include uses of benches, seat walls, et cetera, and as well as additional new landscaping. All of the noted building and site improvements associated with the science-west renovation are in keeping with the college's master plan. Once completed, the newly renovated science- west building will feature large open study areas, small group study rooms, personal computer labs, group tutorial facilities, staff offices, administrative support areas, general use classrooms, a large lecture hall, restrooms, and miscellaneous building support space. The newly renovated building will be constructed of building materials consistent and compatible with that of the existing science center building as well as science ease. As noted in accordance with the Aco State Law, the planning commission's review of this mandatory referral application is to determine consistency of the City's National Plan as defined by state code. With regard to the city's master plan, which is also referenced as the plan in your staff report, staff bonds that the proposal is in keeping with the master plan and the land use designation for public buildings and public facilities usage. Staff must have in courts with Article 66B, Section 3.08 of the annotated State Code of Maryland, the city has 60 days from a date of the submittal to renish this decision on this application. Given that date of submittal was June 11, 2012, the city's decision is due August 10, 2012. If the Planning Commission fails to act on the submission within 60 days after the official submission, the application is considered approved. Thus staff recommends that the Planning Commission approve the applicant's development plans to renovate the modernized the science-wats building, which is in accordance with state law. That concludes our brief overview. I'd be glad to answer any questions? And if not, I'll defer to you. Represents from the college. We're fine, questions of stand, Kate? Yeah, sure. Why is this coming in as a mandatory referral when the first science building, the brand new one, came in as a site plan? Or I'll use permit back then. In the process of accepting this application, one of the, not one of the, what we've had dialogue with the college in the process of an application. It has always been the contention of the college that they are a state agency, and in the past they have, as a courtesy going through the process without asking that this be a mandatory for all. One of the issues was in processing this part of the traffic analysis that was to be done for this project. There was disagreement between the college as to the extent of what they viewed to be reasonable and looking at their transportation report, so to speak. And so over course of meetings with city staff and the college and city attorney's office and actually the college's legal representation, they are state agency and state law says that all their applications could have been and the mandatory forals. So that's why. Okay, my opinion, if anybody from state staff deviates with my understanding, I'll defer to them. Okay, so the original, the new building could have come in as a matter of fact, legally just as a mandatory referral, they went the extra step because that's what they're doing back when. Exactly. The second phase of this, I guess they already, Stan Seas. Yes, thank you. I don't, did that come to us? No, it's a mandatory referral. In fact, what happened is because it's a minor site planned revision. It's an administrative approval through the chief of planning. So in those cases, the planning commission would not have seen it as a mandatory referral, because it's only a minor site plan amendment. And in fact, just to point out with this application, if the college was not adding that additional floor on this to this building, more likely they probably would have been qualified to actually go through the minor site plan amendment process, which is administrative process. Okay, so the scope of the science east, the first of phase two, obviously knowing the floor, what did they do there? It was just full renovation of that building. It's renovating. Exactly. All right. And we don't see a whole lot of mandatory referrals. And I'm just judging by the six conditions that are here, clearly we have the authority to put some conditions on a mandatory referral. I mean, what's the scope of what we can or cannot condition? Well, there's two parts. The first part is really 66 feet is your only authority. So it says that the can't project can't be constructed unless the local jurisdiction improves location character and extent of the development as submitted as consistent with our master plan. However, it's important for you to know that the college can overrule the planning commission's decision, but they needed two-thirds vote of their entire membership. So if you deny it, they can overturn it. If you approve it with conditions, they can overturn the conditions. With two-thirds of their board of trustees. So I think the answer is is can we put conditions on the mandatory approval? Kind of. You can but they might overturn them anyway. Okay and that wouldn't be any kind of court thing that would just be their trustees taking a vote. Right the law really is just because this is between two public entities. So they get a lot of, they don't have to go through our zoning process. Okay. It's just saying location character in extent leaves that a fair bit of what our master plans goals and tail. So that seems to me to be somewhat much narrower than saying it has to comply with our plan, which includes a whole heck of a lot of stuff, even outside of the zoning code. Just a location character and extent has to be consistent with the plan. Thank you. My question is the converse of Cates, which is so they could, the college could be coming in with a use permit. They don't have to, but they did before and they could again accept for running into a disagreement about this traffic study. They decided to go to the mandatory referral. Is that, am I reading that correctly? I would say yes, if in fact the college chose to do that, there's a courtesy to the city. And over the years they've been always professionally working with city staff to process these applications. I think this application was kind of the move in this direction based on that disagreement. The other question I have is for our attorney is so we can make conditions. Can we also make something short of conditions like like recommendations? You can you can make conditions or recommendations. You can make conditions or recommendations they can overturn them. Right, but if we wanted to say something to them but not put it in the legal framework of a condition that they would then have to overrule but just communicate with them some recommendations. We you one, we could do that as well. Sure, but they're not binding. Right, I understand it. This is in terms of communication. I think they don't own overturn it and they accept your conditions or your recommendations, they're not bound by those. Interesting. I would just note that there are certain issues with the college that are greater than this particular project and I think I would direct our attention to this particular project. There are larger issues which have been simmering around for a while but don't really my opinion relate to this project. Any other questions or staff? I need some guidance on a lot of things including this. But in reviewing the recommendation and finding the staff, I don't find that there appears in there any adoption, if you will, of the first recommendation from the Traffic and Transportation Commission. And it is that the barriers be removed for pedestrian and bicycle access at Princeton place in College Parkway. So am I correct in assuming that that that fine or recommendation they made is not included in the staff's recommendation. That's correct. If you look at page two of your staff report, you look at the lessons, I'll say the paragraph before that graphic, and that the very lessons is this, as an agency of the state, as an agency of the state, the college is not subject to municipal zoning regulations, however, subject to mandatory for all those on the state say the determination has been made that the city's comprehensive transportation review is a functional site plan process, which is required, pursuant to the zoning orders. And therefore, it's not applicable to this process. Understood. I dig it, so to speak. I just want to make sure that literally in fact that recommendation is not included in the staff report. No sir. In the staff report as well that cast prepared page 9, the second paragraph under the traffic and transportation commission page 9 items. We did mention the conditions recommended by traffic and transportation commission or campus wide in nature and not directly connected to any identified impacts resulting from this project. So we did look at that. Okay. Any other questions of staff? Would the applicant care to or care to say something about their mandatory referral for ratification? I do represent the college. Okay. Is there a bank on campus now? No. There may be 18. There are 18. So we show with a law firm of Miller-Milleren-Rin can be on behalf of Montgomery College. We very much appreciate staff's thorough report and review of the College's submission. As indicated, the College is an instrumentality of the State of Maryland, established pursuant Maryland's education article, section 16-101, and its subsequent sections. And as such, all the college, the college and all its facilities and facility improvement projects are subject to mandatory for all, specifically section 3.08 of Article 66B. In accordance with those requirements, we, the college submitted a very detailed package of plans, both architectural and engineering plans, included let landscaping and forestry, forest conservation plans and all of the normal development plans that the city sees regularly for other developments. And in addition, we provided a traffic analysis, a traffic study done by the traffic group. We have Glenn Cook here in case you have any questions related to the analysis that was done. But basically bottom line, we found that the trips, there would be no new trip generation as a result of this third floor addition. There is no net increase in classroom instructional space that will result in this renovation edition of the Science West Building. It will occupy the same footprint of the existing building. So for all those reasons, and we can provide further in-depth discussion about the traffic analysis if you would like, but we also took counts at the four intersections, three driveways, one off-site intersection, and confirmed that actually trips have decreased over the last five years from vehicles coming to and from the campus. And this was apt as compared to the 2007 counts that were done before the Science Center building went up and counts taken earlier this year confirming that the trips are going down. And I like to think that that's, you know, I think we believe it's because of the college's very active transportation management efforts and encouragement and investment on right on the college does pay a million dollars a year to help facilitate and encourage their students and staff to use right on. So I think with all those efforts and just kind of the changing nature of the student population and how the college operates, we are seeing trip decrease. So for all that, we think there's limited impact on the city and we believe that we would request that you go ahead and approve the mandatory referral. The conditions that are in the report, all I would have to be able to say at this point with regard to the conditions is that they will be taken under submission. They will be presented to the Board of Trustees and for consideration and the college intends to provide a formal written response to the city within the time period afforded under Article 66B 3.08 which is I believe 60 days from the date you issue the conditions. So we will be doing that. Okay. Questions? Comment I was actually intrigued by the numbers that the number of parking permits for students has decreased. Which seems to me probably a little more accurate even perhaps on trip counts. We're got to mention that, but you're right. Yeah. Any other questions of the applicants? Or today? I don't want to say top of the head or two informally, but of these six conditions that the staff recommends. Are there any, I'm not asking you to approve them or to act for the college, but are there any that you think might raise an issue? And we won't hold your answer against you either way. Yeah, I would have to refrain from commenting on the conditions. They have to be presented to the Board of Trustees. And we will be responding formally. OK. Is the store water man? and we will be responding formally. Okay. Is the store water management? This may probably more of a question for staff. I don't know what you both probably know. The store mortar management, there's condition number six about the dam and where you can put trees. I mean, is this controlled by state law or is that different than our requirements for how you handle a storm plan? I thought that was kind of... It's my understanding that the applicant has been working with the city's public work staff as well as the city forces office. And so that comments directly from them saying that because we're at Dan, this is on that they can't plan trees. And so it's just how, in fact, the public works department regularly set that pond. And the college has basically been in compliance with the city's development, I mean, the Department of Public Works review of the Stonewall Management facility. So it's very forward. Trees can't be planned on that day. But yeah, I mean, I gather that, and I can guess some good reasons why not. But I would assume that our standards have to meet state standards. I mean, they can't different too much really. I mean, isn't this just kind of. I would agree. No, I'm coming down from federal to state. I would agree. I think the city absolutely the city's requirements are in line with state with state law. So I absolutely agree with that. You can ask him about it. Sure. That's my understanding based on conversations with the board. Well, of course, with this project. Okay. If I may, although I can't speak to any specific condition that the college obviously will comply with all applicable laws and requirements, so there's no, you know, just if there was any question in your mind. If in fact there's a discrepancy found in our plans that doesn't comport to some legal requirement, we will make those corrections. All right. So go ahead. When you say the plan, I'm presuming you're not talking about our comprehensive master plan, and where I'm going with that is the traffic study that fits into the CTR hasn't been done. So my first question is why hasn't it been done and per is it the master plan or are city ordinance? It says the application submitted within five years and it's approved application for the site and the applicant should be required to complete a traffic study to include a 2007 science center application. So I'm sort of leaning, not sort of, I'm leaning to have that as a recommendation, but can you tell me why they'd be some pushback? First, the city's comprehensive transportation review is an element of your zoning ordinance. So it's under the rubric and framework of your zoning review. As an instrumentality of the state, this college is not under law subject to local zoning ordinance. Here to four, in the past, the college has cooperated with the city and undergone analysis and done the review. We, on this particular project, we ran into a situation where, yes, the sign center project was done less than five years ago. Under your newly adopted CTR, you have a piecemeal provision that if projects are coming in within a five-year period, that they have to be reconsidered. So we took a look at that. The problem that we have with that is that the traffic analysis that was done for the Science Center, at that time, you didn't have your CTR, but you had your traffic review allowed for the college's trips to be analyzed based on student generation. And that is an acceptable form, acceptable methodology under IT, you know, international traffic engineering standards. And that was what we did back in 2007. Today, your CTR and your transportation staff is interpreting provisions of your CTR as to not allow us to do that again, even though the industry and the professionals say for junior college trip generation, really looking at student number, student enrollment, student protections, that's the most accurate. It's not square footage. It's square footage, like office square footage correlates to X number of square feet, equals X number of trips, and there's significant data that supports that. That's just not the same with regard to junior college use. We made our argument, we said, well let us do this, we're using student generation. But it's not that the numbers would have come out significantly off, but it just didn't make sense to apply a standard that wasn't really applicable in reality. That was one issue. The other issue, the piecemeal within five years. The CTR, the analysis we did for Science Center was done, like I said, with that analysis. It showed that we would have no, not a significant impact for that. Because of the five-year staff was indicating, okay, well, we've got to redo the Science Center analysis now based on square footage. So we were being asked, even though we passed the test in 2007 for the Science Center using student generation, to redo the Student Assign Center traffic analysis using square footage, which would have generated something like 800 trips. We are not going to generate 800 trips on this campus as a result of this project and we have shown with the driveway counts that were confirmed earlier this year that the science center is not generating 800 trips. So I think from a college's perspective, they are obligated, their funding is through state taxpayers, I mean the financing for their project, they are obligated to do and act in the most fiscally responsible manner. I don't think that the college felt that they could proceed on such a path to concede that they're going to be generating 800 trips and that would correlate to, I don't know, what type of mitigation that would result in. We just didn't want to and believe that it wasn't in the best interest of the city, nor the college to enter into that type of, what we felt was a fictional exercise. And that's basically kind of the conflict that we found ourselves in. And that's why we declined to do the CTR. So you're saying that the city has a faulty transportation policy and the The college is trying to bring that to the city's attention I mean not say that you have a faulty if you want to say I'm trying to understand if we have a faulty if we have because Fundamental this is what I'm hearing is that because you have a special power from the state You think our law is crappy so you don a special power from the state, you think our law is crappy so you don't want to abide by it. I mean, in a nutshell, that's what I'm hearing. And that's okay if it is. It's just, I think we need to understand what that pushback is. I think that's a highly unfair characterization. Okay. Then what is the care? I think the result of applying the law in that that and mind you the your CTR does allow flex I'm it allows flexibility to use student generation as far as I'm concerned so then the argument is why not come to the table if there is that flexibility Because your staff would your city wouldn't allow it Ah I see If the city weren't allowed then the college wouldn't have an issue. Like I said, for this application, because of the timing and because the conflict arose, kind of late in the process, we decided to move forward on the mandatory referral under just strict state law. There in the meetings with the city attorney and city manager, we've talked about how we handle future applications and the college We've committed to come back to the table and talk to the city about how to handle future applications and Dealing with these type of loss and I mind you and I know the city doesn't I don't like to mention other jurisdictions when I'm before the city But mandatory referral is something that is done all over the state. And other jurisdictions allow entities like the college to come to the table and talk about, okay, what's the analysis that we're gonna undergo for mandatory referral? That's done in the county. So when I represent the college in front of the county and we have to determine what kind of traffic analysis is done, I sit down with the staff at the county level parking planning and we talk about it. What kind of use are you planning to do? What kind of generation does it fit under? It's a flexible, negotiated process under mandatory referral for other jurisdictions. I have yet to run into a situation where I'm told, I can't negotiate what's reasonable, what's fair under mandatory referral. And I'm told I can't negotiate what's reasonable what's fair under mandatory referral. And I'm hoping that we can get there with the city for future applications with regard to the college. So admittedly, it doesn't make sense to say your traffic generation is not based on students but square footage when it wouldn't apply to your case. So I can see why the college would push back. Another issue is just if we do have that exception, I think we need to find out why that's not on the table because it seems like now we get to the point, it's just very cratic red tape. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. But having said that, I need to find out for sure if that is the case, because if it is, and our hands would be tied. Even though I do fundamentally agree with you, it's just if our laws say that we have to go through this, which I'd like to find out, if that is the case, then our hands are tied. But if that is not the case, then we need to see what we can do about this, not to be such a thorn. So can we get the answer to that? We have that flexibility? We meaning as far as the CTR process itself. Yes. We might have to defer to public works. And there may be an answer that this can't provide a commission tonight, but if it's something the commission is directing staff to look at, I think that would be. Well, because that's going to change our recommendations, right? Because at the end, they could always just say, well, we don't agree. We're going to do what we think is in the mess interest of the college. But if we are flexible, then I mean, why not have that? What though maybe post on this and let them know your comments are are Certainly valid for anything future that comes down the line we got in this situation in the first place because of Good faith on both sides for many years and then somehow or another that because of a different issue that nothing to do with buildings cost them I don't the different issue that nothing to do with buildings cost some. Well, I don't know if it's maybe that's something I just don't understand if we've identified the issue and we do have the flexibility. How can that not be addressed now or is it just a waste of time? If it is, let me know when we'll move on. I'll stop. If I may, I mean, I think it's something for future application, but this application has been initiated under Article 66B 3.08. It's a 60-day period for which you have to respond. If you do not act, it's presumed to be approved, nonetheless, and we can proceed. So I think at this point, for this project, we are in this process. Correct. We're on the main line with this one, but we can certainly ask staff to look into what you're talking about for future things that will come down. Because you've got a number of other things of your master plan that you'll eventually be doing anyway. So the college is chosen its pathway tonight and it's not going to come back and open a re-negotiation on another basis tonight. It am what it am and we have a limited time in which to consider it. So my understanding is that the difference between the city and the college on the transportation methodology is sidestepped by handling as a mandatory referral. We would only be considering it if it was a use permit. But since because of the log jam, they have come on the mandatory referral route where the CTR process is not relevant. Is that, am I reading that right? Yes. Okay. That's my understanding. If I could refer you to the Transportation Commission memo, it gets on page 4-3. There's a table at the bottom, okay. And it compares the square footage, peak morning, afternoon trip generation, and then based on a student methodology. You can tell that we're not that far off on this issue alone. So in other words, the analysis that we did do is fairly close to what would have been had we done the CTR. The problem with the CTR is the piecemeal provision. Within the five years, forcing me to come back with the science center that you approved and we passed that test. And having to recalculate, I don't know, what the 120,000 square feet that I built on the science center and having to mitigate for that. I mean, that was the problem, that piecemeal. And in addition to the student generation, you know, square footage would, you know, what can you use? So there are a couple problems that we had with the seat. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Not right now. Okay. Thank you very much. So, any one in the room that would care to speak on this particular mandatory referral application? Councilman Prashella. Good evening members of the Planning Commission. Mark Pr Pachela, 816 Fordham Street, S.A.M. and Council Member of City of Rockville. I'm here speaking, I'm going to read something from Elise Gustav, who's a member of the Board of Directors of the Plymouth Woods kind of Indian Association with respect to this application. And I start right now. I reviewed the planning commission agenda and note that item C, PR, J, 2012-0110702, mandatory referral application by Montgomery College to renovate modernite and expand the existing science-west classroom building located on the Rockville campus. Montgomery College states on page two their proposal, paragraph 2C, implementing ADA and lighting upgrades to the pedestrian bridge at Connect Science West to the Macklin Tower building. By a way of reference, the Macklin building is just beyond the fence that Montgomery College agreed to upgrade as a condition by the Planning Commission to be given to permit to construct the Science West building. Furthermore, on page five by their old mission, Montgomery College Stace has noted in the College Facilities Master Plan, the circulation network in and through the campus buildings does not adequately provide access to all instructional areas or disabled persons. Many campus facilities are not compliant with Americans with Disabilities Acts, ADA. On page seven, Montgomery College proposes a new, enhanced pedestrian walkways and pathways as a condition of rescinding and planning commissions approval to modify the science and engineering complex. Finance and page 11 under the title of Community Outreach, Montgomery College did meet with the area residents in March 7, 2012. However, at that time, Montgomery College did not put forth a response to opening the fence. At the very least, we request that Montgomery College provide their plan for opening the fence so that disabled individuals may be able to access a Rockville campus and bus routes, or perhaps the utilization of alternate dispute resolution, ADR, approved by the Rockville City Council can bring about a meaningful compromise. As we have always been and are still prepared to discuss this matter with those individuals and authority at Montgomery College to address this unresolved matter that has been going on for approximately three years. In the event that ADR has yet to be implemented, this will be a model case to commence the ADR procedures in the city. It should be noted that the communities that surround Rockville campus residents are growing older and some becoming even more severely disabled by virtue of age and attended debilitating illness illnesses. In addition, these residents do to retirement through desiratate courses becoming more dependent on public transportation, i.e. the buses that run through Montgomery College. I'm quite certain that Montgomery College is anxious to comply with the ADA requirements. The opening of the fence would amply satisfy that ADA requirement or it would be a big plus and public relations coup by showing themselves to be a good neighbor to the surrounding communities. Therefore, we respectfully request that the Planning Commission make as a condition of their approval of the application, the use of voluntary ADR or that the interpretation of a new enhanced pedestrian walkways and pass as a condition receiving the planning commission's approval to modify the science and injuring complex include the opening of the fence near the Macan Tower building. And I will also add that Lisa's authorized me to say publicly that she is one of those individuals who has her mobility reduced by not any longer being able to access the buses on Montgomery College campus. I think in my now is my opinion and I think that her suggestion of putting as a condition that the college come in the alternative dispute resolution to discuss this with both the Plymouth Woods Connomenonial Association in the city, I think is a good one because it's not already saying you have to open the fence that says come in good faith to this ADR process. I reopen it. You know, I know that since I live in that community, affected by it, there's certainly a lot of people in the community who'd like to see that reopen in a way that does not impact adversely the residents on Princeton Place. We think that can be done and we think the way to approach it would be the ADR. It's an excellent suggestion. So that's it. On our behalf. Okay, thank you. Questions? Jack? Maybe you could let us know what the progress has been to date or what the process, the current status of this issue. Well, probably I think about a year ago, we, or maybe a year and a half ago, I and a few others did propose an alternative solution to the college it was just dismissed. And the, you know, we feel still feel that the adoption, no smoking on the campus, did adversely impact the city. In particular, the residents of Plentywood's College Gardens. It's a complex situation. It's not a whole lot of all terms, but we thought we found a few. Anyway, when they do come before the planning commission, either for mandatory referral or through the normal process, it is a chance to formally put something in the record that, you know, we haven't forgotten it. We would still like that open on our, you know, I heard tonight that their application conforms to the master plan. I'm not sure it conforms the bicycle master plan. I don't know yes or no on our bike map. It's still shown as a bike route going through there, but with a dash line and a note saying Montgomery College closed it. But you know, got that whole northern part of the city can't access the campus that way. So anyway, it's a chance to deformally say something. Well, I guess my question is, and staff has recommended omitting that particular recommendation from the conditions on the grounds that it's sort of beyond the purview of the science west building. Would you suggest some justification that would bring it back into our purview? Well, I did it. I am the liaison of the traffic and transportation commission. I was there a few weeks ago and they brought up and they're the ones who start talking about accessibility and biking through the campus and all that sort of stuff. I think that's part of what they've talked about. And however that closing that fence is certainly cuts a lot of that off. But I will say that what I'm asking is not exactly what the traffic and transportation commission said, which was a condition, open it up. What I'm saying is I would ask you and Lisa's on who suggested it to ask them to come into an ADR process, alternative dispute resolution. Now, you're the commission, it's your choice, it's your judgment and I respect that. But I think that was a good alternative suggestion on this gas house part. Would having it be a recommendation as opposed to a condition? The reasonable in your answer? Sure. Yeah. By the way, I support this. I mean, I think it's a great idea. We love Montgomery College. I think as far as I'm concerned, there's one issue I should resolve differently. But I think it's a real asset. This is not a huge thing. There will be other things that come forward later. That'll be huge. And then my last question is, you know, I feel a little bit on an issue like this where it's between the city and my Montgomery College that handling at this level of the planning commission is a little like the tale trying to wag the dog. You guys are the governing body, is there something that you can do? Well, I, you know, we certainly have tried, but this is a touch point where whether through a formal process or mandatory for all they have to come to you, okay, so that's why and and you know, like if I recall correctly at another application a few years ago that was a condition for the planning commission that was not met and So you know, but you'd use your judgments and you're asking great questions, you already are. As a practical matter, if it's not treated as a binary situation where the gate is either open or closed, and there's a desire in 80 yard to try to find some accommodation for all the interests involved, practically speaking, what are some dimensions or what are some ideas that could work? We say limited hours of its open or? No, I think that kind of stuff's not going to work. But we did submit a plan. I just soon leave it at that. And the ADR would at least make the college talk to us about it. Because as far as I know, they do is dismiss it. But there's not this key passes and all that stuff. I think we're all agreed, won't work. We've discussed that. We discussed 20 things. So it does come back to either being open or closed? Yeah, but there's other things that can be done to, I mean, there's a couple of problems. One is the students on the circle at the end of Princeton place. They already are in nuisance if they go back. They can. But it was three some years ago, and it was not well handled at that time. And that not well handling it in the first place really contributed to the strength of the reaction both ways. And I think now time has passed as time to talk about it. And was the abuse or the undesirable sort of conditions that were attributed to the gate being opened three years ago, whenever it was reviewed. Mainly, with it, mainly recognized that students were the root cause or the primary cause of that as opposed to people who otherwise passed through from the neighborhood. Remarrow had been open for decades before then without any problem. I mean, there's also a parking issue but as far as behavior of students or or whomever individuals that was never a problem. Anyway, I, Mr. Leader, man, you ask great questions and I think it's really up to you all and I do want to say I'm a big supporter of Montgomery College and I wholeheartedly suggest you approve it and I think you know I'm proof of college but I also say that this is one of our few chances to remind them and if you would put it as this condition at least makes their board of trustees discuss it and vote on it and there might be some value in that but if if you want to make it as a recommendation, that's fine. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I would note that we did receive two other emails, one from a group of residents on Princeton. And another one who's a professor at the college and is the usual either side again. It has continued for a good number of years. Any other person in the room would care to comment it all about this particular mandatory referral? Good. Now, discussion among ourselves. Jack. I have actually a not question of whoever is here representing the NC I guess it was in you, Mr. there was there's something else in the record from a citizen that lives in the adjacent neighborhood talking in general terms about the general impact of the growth of Montgomery College on the adjacent residential neighborhood, the noise and construction, so forth. My question is, when there's a construction project going on on campus, given that there's an adjacent single family neighborhood. What does the college do in terms of helping to ease, mitigate the impact in terms of like, is there notification of the hours when work is going to be done, when noise is going to be generated? Can you tell us what the typical process is? Well, we have Sandra Filippi from the Fisillides Management Department. You can maybe address it more specifically, but I could tell you that the college's college comports with all the noise ordinance requirements that normally have hours of restriction of how much you can do at P.C. and point and the college has provided notice and has had a very open relationship communication with its neighbors generally. But I'll let Sandra if you wanted to add anything more specific. Well, I guess I just want to respond, you know, based on what the citizen who wrote us with their concerns and to sort of wonder, you know, if there are some steps that during the construction process that you, the college would take to sort of like reach out to the immediate neighbors in terms of, you know. Right. I read that correspondence and my assessment was, I couldn't get from that kind of an instance or specific activity that was of issue. And if we could know a bit more about what detail then we could kind of go back and fix or kind of address it for future, but without knowing what instance she was really. The letter was quite broad in general and sweeping. And it didn't really identify. Then let me ask you this. If neighborhoods on that, neighbors on that street had specific concerns about the process of construction, how would they, who would they call or approach to talk about it? Right. Sandra Filippi would be the, there's person Jan wanted to come in. And if the community wanted to find out the construction schedule, when one is more known, I mean, that's something that we don't have fully fleshed out at the moment, I'm sure we could communicate it. Hi, I'm Jan at Qbar. I'm the acting vice president of facilities and security. And we do comply with the city and county noise ordinances during the week before, no noise before 7am. On occasion, if we've had even custodial staff or ground staff, do the leaf blowers too early, the neighbors will let us know. They know who to call. They call our facilities operations in maintenance office. And on the weekend it's 9 a.m. according to the noise ordinances. So we do comply with those. And as far as I know we haven't gotten any complaints. So I'm not quite sure if we, if there was more information we could provide something to that effect. But it's not unlike any construction project in the we could provide something to that effect. But it's not unlike any construction project in the city of Rockville in that regard. I had to call myself for a construction across the road from me when they were unloading tractor trailers at 5 a.m. So. I'll just say, whatever you can give in terms of notice construction schedule, what the immediate neighbors can expect, it would probably help to help the neighborhood to adjust to it. Certainly. Thank you. Any other questions? General Pable? Okay. Discussion? Yes. Any other questions? General people? Okay, discussion Yes start with Kate this time Well, I think you know given the situation we're in You know I think we're all well aware of the saga of the fence It's connection to this In terms of the building itself and this project itself. I'm, you know, God's speed, because this looks fine to me. I don't think there is a problem specifically with the building in terms of the location character and extent regarding our plan by any way shape or form. I think if we want to add other conditions or recommendations, I think our conditions probably are recommendations and the way this seems to be set up. So, you know, I mean, I am personally and disappointed that a resolution with the fence didn't come up because it was represented to us by the college when the first in the new building was being here and we agreed to close the fence because of the extreme nuisance on Princeton Place that, you know, there'd be a good faith effort to try and work something out because it's clearly a huge negative impact on our traffic and transportation point of view. There's no question about that and it would be really nice, I think, for all parties to find a solution to that and I'm very disappointed that it hasn't happened. So I'm not sure if this is a vehicle that's going to get this done or change anything. It would be very nice if some negotiations could come up. I'm also very aware that the neighborhood itself is quite divided. So this is not an easy thing to solve. The neighborhood isn't speaking with one voice. The college is trying to negotiate with them. I mean, they have a smoking policy that I personally agree with. You know, there were a lot of very creative solutions that came up over the years. But, you know, I'm not, I don't think we can fix the fence problem with this personally. So I'm game for a nice polite recommendation to go to alternate dispute resolution. I think I wouldn't would not support saying anything one way or the other on what to do. Because I don't know. So. But I would support this project in general. I support it as well. I think it's good to go. I think the fence is a political question. It's not the first time the college has heard it. I don't think it will be the last time. So I don't think there's a need to be redundant. The staff issue though and the flexibility. That's something we'll ask the chairman for us to look into it. Staff, whether it's an executive session or maybe a phone call or something just to get to the bottom of that. You get to staff report, we can talk to Andy about that. Okay. Any other comments from people? Entertain a motion or whatever, yes, Chair? Well, I just wanted, I think that Councilman Prashella has made a pretty persuasive argument that, I mean, you know, this is a major issue and we don't get very many opportunities to talk with Montgomery College and that the idea of making a condition or a recommendation not to open the fence, but to just come to the ADR process would be reasonable. I understand that it's not exactly applicable to the third floor of science west, but as Mr. Prashayla has said, we don't get too many chances. And would at least bring to the Board of Trustees attentionless issue. So I would be open to supporting, you know, either a condition that just a dialogue we reopened on this issue. I don't know if there's any support for that. Well, as far as I'm concerned I would not support that because this is a science west project and from knowing the history of where we've been all the way along this is not going to go away with this or not with with this at all. However, if the planning commission wishes to take action on the application and then as a sidebar make a comment or something not connected with this, you know, that's fine too. But I think that this is a constituent part of their master plan and we ought to handle it that way. And as my other colleague says, it may not be exactly a political question small p for all the folks who have been involved in it over the years but to add a condition even though it would be oh thank you and that's it. It muddies the water of this particular application, which is a good Good application. I think that's a good idea John. If we want to say something to say it separately And you know, I would encourage Mr. Perchail on the rest of the council to keep picking up the phone because We could observe that ADR would be a good way to go to handle Issues that are Supra would be one, certainly one option. But I don't see why this is our only opportunity to talk to the college. I mean, the mayor and council spent years, I think, trying to talk to the college. And talking to the, you know, there were meetings. I don't know. The progress has certainly been listening. Maybe we don't have the action we want, but we being generally the city. But Mr. Chairman, what kind of sidebar would you consider? I think if we if we dispense for the item here, we could also we could have as a follow on recommendation for the general purposes of, you know, community college forms to use the ADR process to handle issues such as, you know, fence traffic studies, whatever, because that is that as we all know in our own jobs, you know, interpretation of what is written in a statute or a document. Oh, I could go on a long time. That's just my opinion. Further discussion from among my colleagues. I think it's easy to get distracted. And I think we were becoming distracted because what's before us is whether or not the applicants development plans to renovate modernize and expand science was classroom. And then according to 64b section 3 3.08, and then to the court of Maryland, and it complies with, uh, or, uh, the master plan, the college's plan, and yes, there's some issues with traffic and everything, but, I mean, that's before, so, I think it stands. Well, I would entertain a motion of some sort or another. I will move approval of PRJ. It's a new one. 2-0-1-1-1-0-2 mandatory referral, 51 Manie Street Montgomery College. What's the finding finding time? Find nine and 10 and conditions on page 11. Yes. As as. Okay. Second. Seconded. You need further discussion. All in favor of the motion. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Good. I'm going to go with the motion. Say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Good. I don't go away. Don't go any other discussion before the commission on this matter or related matter. On a related matter. I would like to have the planning commission express to Montgomery College our fervent desire that they engage in the city's ADR process to deal with issues that come up between the city and Montgomery College. City neighborhoods in Montgomery College. I think it's again, it's redundant and unnecessary because there's several avenues of approach. One, the political process, secondly, directly to the campus. And I just think the Planning Commission get involved in what I think is a political question. It's just a path we do not want to go in because it gets murky and it gets a lot of sort of stink on the planning commission. So no, I would not be in favor. I think there are some parties here that have probably heard us in our opinions and I think they've heard opinions of the city for a long time on this. So I guess I tend to agree with the on that this is a little bit outside the scope of what the Planning Commission does. I think it's in Mr. Pashayla's court. Maybe some other than the room. It's certainly from the city's point of view. I don't know. All right. I'm just... Thank you all very much. Oh, and Ms. Newton's. Herbio. Well, she's our observed very nice. Okay, I know. No, but they've all right. A couple more items to handle. Relatively quickly. Staff report of any sort. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no discuss the topic of maximum expansion limits, based on your discussion at the previous meeting. And I'll say a little bit more about that in just a moment as I give a quick update from the mayor and council meeting from the past Monday night. A quick heads up on a couple of meetings that are coming up in September. You're gonna be consecutive Wednesdays, September 12th, and then the 19th. And we're trying to schedule a couple of different work sessions, one to finish up the APFO discussion that you started earlier this summer on schools, and also to conduct another work session on the Rockville Pike. The Pike Work Sessions is going to come first on the 12th, where you're going to talk about the code administration, components of the Pike. How it's actually going to be implemented to the zoning code and other Design standards and you're also going to have a couple of other items on the meeting on the 12th and one is a reconsideration request of The plat approval for 104 west Jefferson that will be on that agenda as well And you may have one or two other subdivision platts final plat for approval Depending if if they all shake out. One might be on the 12th, might be on the 19th, we're not quite sure yet, but those are the main items you're looking at for September 12th. For the 19th, what we'd like to do is schedule the final work session on the school's APFO discussion, skip that evening regarding the pike, but just focus in on getting back to the school's discussion that you started earlier and I think you were pretty close and working through all the items that were identified by the APFO task force on just the school's part. So what we'd like to do is schedule that for the 19th. We had a brief discussion with Chairman Hill about that last week and we think that's going to work as well on that agenda. And just a quick note on a couple of other agendas coming up in October, you're going to probably have a discussion back on the pike again October 10th. I know this is further down the road dealing with congestion management with the pike plan and what we're planning on doing is maybe beginning the APFO discussion about the traffic standards at that evening as well. I know that's kind of the next big item that you'll need to dive into as far as the APFO work. And I know Chairman Hill wanted to kind of continue that discussion and once you're done with schools begins the traffic discussion. And that's gonna require coordination between our shop and DPW, but I think they're ready to commit and October and start that discussion as well, as far as the CTR and the APFO APFS considerations regarding traffic. So just a little bit of a heads up as far as what's coming up in September and October. Andy, when are we on track to end the pike plan? Saga. And to say great question, because we're trying to chart out the final steps also. We're looking at maybe three more work sessions, tops, and then maybe presumably schedule a public hearing end of this year beginning of 2013. But we think we can actually schedule a public hearing, we think, by the end of this calendar year. Commission, public hearing, on a commission draft of the Pike Plan. Really 2013, make a recommendation on a draft plan and forward it onto Marin Council. You're closer than you think, we think. Just want to be sure that there's a suitable period for the public to comment on. And that's about week to week, see either. Yes, you know, considerable, because since we've made a number of adjustments to what they commented on before, right, I think that would be appropriate. Yeah, okay. Mr. Chair, just one more thing. A couple of notes from the meeting this past Monday night with Mayor and Council, and actually another Council as well. Regarding annexations, first of all, you may have heard the City of Gathur's bird did approve the serious annexation Monday night at their meeting, and now would take effect. I heard two dates, September 20th or September 25th, but somewhere in that range, at the end of the 45 day period, that would actually begin, that would actually take effect at that point, around the middle to the end of September. But they did approve that annexation. Our mayor and council voted to hold off on the shady Grove road right of way annexation for now. You may recall that the annexation plans in front of the commission went to mayor council and there was a tentative public hearing date for that in September but the vote was to hold off on that at this point. They say why, Andy? Why the vote was to hold off? I think it was an under-mute move. It was recognition that Gathersburg probably was not going to drop their pursuit of the annexation. Plain and simple. Just as far as the timing of it, they were pretty far along the city of Gathersburg and assuming they were going to prove it Monday night, this just wasn't going to have the effect that was hoped when it was... And the discussion was at the end of the evening when they had found out what Gaysburg had actually done. Right. And other options were discussed as well at the council meeting. They're well aware of the discussion that you're going to have on maximum expansion limits reopening that later this month when you have your special meeting. Other options have been discussed as well. I'm sure and we're not sure what all would be pursued at this point, but there's a lot of other suggestions that are out there at this point. One other thing I'll mention real quick is that there was a lengthy discussion also about town center two plans and the master plan for downtown. I'll comment on that in a minute. Okay, but there was an application, actually a pre-application of this file for the old giant site by JBG. And part of that would come to the Planning Commission for subdivision approval. But it was a plan for a two-story office and retail building, accommodating the Bank of America that would move out of its current location in the pink building into this new site next door. And there's a lot of discussion about making sure that we collectively can look at kind of a comprehensive approach to that development, that portion of the town center master plan. And making sure it fits in with the overall vision that we all really anticipated within the master plan. So there is a pre-application development review committee meeting tomorrow morning. It's still scheduled for that pre-application that's been filed for that site. But in the meantime, there will be discussions also by the mayor and council members. I'm sure with representatives from JBG as well to kind of talk about the bigger vision and looking at it more holistically. Then they're just initial small phase of the project that they're looking at. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm doing two. We just got handed this big long memo at the same time I'm trying to look. I'll comment on that. So you'll, it's the Bank of America for which this thing is, you know, the primary side. The last plan we saw the giant was going to be reused for a nonprofit in the back of America was going to move in that was I don't know 152 years ago or something It was one of the three places Bank of America and so now this will be their fourth chance to go somewhere else I might feel permanent home Yeah, you had approved a couple of temporary locations. And then KSI actually had their plans to bring them back if they would develop. Now this is a plan that would relocate them permanently off the KSI property onto the old giant. So the money's there for the next phase of the other corner. But there's a separate issue, which I mentioned in a minute on that. Well, yeah, there's a lot of issues in 10th Senate. Anything else? That's it. Okay. I have one thing on scheduling. I just meant. I have one thing on the proposed schedule for our meetings that I'd like to rate. I'm unavoidably going to have to miss the meeting on the 19th of September. And I might miss August or October 3rd as well. As to the discussion of schools. September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September and on the 19th of September I'd be highly interested in participating in that. It to be discussed, I'm just putting out there. Okay, sure. I'm sure we can accommodate that. We'll talk with the committee. Sure, I'm going to second question. I have passed out to you fear, fear information only. These some thoughts that Dave had based on the activity that went on Monday night. We are in the Gazette mayor's quoted as suggesting that the planning commission should look at some things and we've already talked about looking at the whole growth element, not just North but South East and West and everything else and taking to look at some of the things that the staff had originally proposed to us when we were discussing the growth element two years ago. So if you've got comments, send them directly to Dave back. This is something that he put together and asked to share with you if it came up on the agenda tonight. It's his personal thought so you can ask him first. You know, not for discussion tonight, but this will be the basis of some of the things we'll talk about on the 29th. The thing I wanted to mention about Mary Council on Monday night dealing with the pre-app on North Washington Street, I forget the gender item, but what's interesting about this is a developer has created the impression of doing piecemeal approach when I believe Mary Council asked specific questions about various things they were all saying they had got to that point yet they hadn't really thought about it or it was not really decided and I think that is a dangerous opportunity you know we've spent a lot of time here trying to know what's happening holistically in the city and what's happening holistically on the outskirts of the city too which is why we had the white flip two proposal in here and the white and the science center and all the rest of it we've been trying to find that out but I'm concerned about Town Center 2 if the mayor council or us are put in a position of having to look at pieces rather than the whole looksy. One has the impression that I got the impression myself that it's in pieces because then only the director planning has to have to fiddle with it. That may be the wrong assumption, but I mean, just the way it looks and for development processes for some of these people, they really know ahead what they're going to try to do. And I think for for staff purposes that we need to be a prize of those sorts of things, not that we sit in any meetings, but it's my concern anyway that when we talk to folks like that, if it's a multi-phased project, they should at least know what they want to do overall in the big phase before they come in on little stuff, because especially in areas like Townsend or two and some of the other remaining larger parcels in the city. Well, you want to, I don't want to see little bits and pieces coming in. That's kind of rambly, but Andy and you and David and Jim, you know, when you do these things that's of real interest to us. Now it's embarrassed by being asked by the mayor what did I think about something on this project and we had never even heard about it. So we heard about it Monday night. I just think that when we're looking to make recommendations to the mayor and council about the directions the city should be taking and things we get to going on. We need to know as much as we can what the influences are going to be. My opinion. At the pre-app meeting last week that JBG held over in the Vizarts Center Councilman Prachalla was there. They spoke to this really with a unity of point of view of concern about postage stamp or what do you want to call it development and pointed out factors of different ownership of different parcels. Yeah, and a real problem with that. And of their efforts to try to purchase other parcels, but not being successful in doing so. End of timing and APFO, creating confusion about what the pace of development might be, even if you do it. And the pace of the market and the influence here, all of which is to say, I think that there is information and there can be dialogue. And I think that at least that particular developer really has an eye for that and is more than willing to dialogue about that. It's done very well with the project. But their bottom line is of course they can't predict the future because there's too many variables. I'm very frustrated with town center too. We want to begin to my feelings on this but You know the city has not and not and not for year after year Delt with a plan for town centers to it's been talked about since I don't know when The first study was done. I don't know if anybody remember what year that was at town center to plan 2003 slash four three slash four. Yeah. And nothing has happened with it since then. And we put it into the economy tank, I suppose, a part of the problem. But now in the meantime, we have not gotten a plan together. We've not worked out the APF, which basically means there's no development of the type that was envisioned in the master plan, even possible there. And we spent, I don't know how many, I forget how many years now talking about redoing the APF, we have now. So I'm just spending some frustration that the pace that we're moving at has now put us into a position where the economy is turning around. We're seeing a lot of developments coming in. I wish we could get some of the stuff that's going on in Twin Brook. It's more, this is a metro-centered area. And Town Center II is not a place for, I won't mention any particular projects, but we know what little bits and pieces that we're seeing. And I'm personally upset by that. I think it's bad planning. You know, whatever any individual wants to see, we don't have a good plan for that area. That, you know, is getting us into a position that's gonna set us up. One of the things we want to see on too. One of the things we may be able to work with staff on, somewhere along on our work list here is the master plan calls for the alignment of Dawson and for Maryland Avenue, which they discussed Monday night. And maybe that's something that we could really take a peek at to make a recommendation as to how that's you before property owners. You know, there's a time when you need to well never well never yeah there needed there needed to be more intervention with the city early on you know property owners much more proactively and tick-tock the years have gone by and now here we are with the drive-through two-story building you know it's not making me happy okay but I don't know what we can do about it at this point. I really don't. That's too much. It's a vented. Anybody else? Here we are. All right. Two sets of minutes. Well, actually, I think that. Yeah, actually, before we get to the minutes, I know you wanted to go home. But on the way. Oh, hell, let's see. On the way hiking to that pre-app meeting that ABG sponsored and considering the dialogue and the information that we've had about APFO and schools and the information of how the county determines what capacity is going to be presently and going forward, mirroring somewhat what Kate was saying, but on a different level. I think we also, as a city, have failed to be proactive in doing our own school projections and providing those to Montgomery County Public Schools sufficiently in advance. And that's, I think we could do more to sort of claim our own school capacity. We have these projects that they may be years away, but these are the schools we're going to need sooner or later. And let's get them into the drawing boards, not that we can make the county act, I realize. But it's like we have, every year, it's kind of a year of attrition where we only look at that year and we look behind a little bit and we kind of use, I won't say sterile data but perhaps not accurate data to project the future. I mean, we do board data. It could be. I'm just saying if if Townsendor 2 was built out, what student population would come out of that? Retro-ical tonight, but I think that's a fair question. And the fact that the timing isn't certain is conceded, but over a large and a period of time, you do concede that you're going to need that school capacity. It is just a matter of time. Get our dibsies in early. OK. All right. Thanks. All right. Any other new business? Any old business? New business. Minutes. On new business, I'm based on the email we got I wondering if we don't need an executive session on a matter that was presented in email. I don't know if Marcia ever got my email because it was sent very late right before the meeting. So I don't know what you think if that's something that we need to deal with if it can wait. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. You should be on the 12th. Yes. First me. Okay. That's when we're going to be taking that around the three. Yeah. Okay. I don't know when we would schedule it sooner than that, but we'll coordinate. And I can find a box. Yeah. Okay. September 12th which you've got is Kate's case question to them okay minutes of meeting number 14 2012 yes sir I'm under work session items if you have a work session. Can we not the 27? We're on the 27th. I'm sorry. Okay. June 27th. June 27th. Page two, work session items under APFO work session, paragraph four. Straw vote was taken to not spend any more time with the exception regarding two to five I would like to thank the committee for the recording. I would like to thank the committee for the recording. I would like to thank the committee for the recording. I would like to thank the committee for the recording. I would like to thank the committee for the recording. I just happened to review that because it's actually you voted in majority of the headly. All right. Any other adjustments? I'm going to move it through the minutes of this. I wasn't here, but I'm going to vote anyway. I will second the motion. Seconded. All in favor? All right. All right. Minutes 17-2012 July 25 Any changes or Okay, here are a motion. Move approval of minutes of July 25th, 2012. Second. Move the second, please. All right. All right. Okay. Anything else for the good of the order? All right. I'll entertain a motion. Motion adjourned. Second. Second, thirded and forced and so on. Thank you all. We are adjourned. Next meeting is August 29th.