15 ATTACHMENT 9 - Laserfiche WebLink

When I walked the property with Tom Pico, he referred to it as taking a piece of butter and sort of lopping off the top of a piece of butter. To me, that was an interesting comment, and I feel like the top of a hill is a little more than a piece of butter that you can just play with and take off 40 feet from, so I have trouble with that. Chairperson Maas: And I think that the Specific Plan guidelines are the topography dictates what you can do. And I think to a certain point, you have to say the environment says you cannot place the house of your dreams or the house that you really want there because the topography is dictating what I can put there. Commissioner Blank: I think it is difficult to, at least, at this point in time, look at the peer review comments. When I read them, they shocked me. And I, frankly, purposely did not read this report until after I visited the site, and I thought I had actually misread the report. I went back and read it again,. This cannot be what it is really saying. And without better data, we do not really know. This troubles me as a location because I do not even know what it is going to look like. And the peer review says I do not know what it is going to look like. And as much confidence as the applicant may express in the peer reviewer's initial work for whatever reasons, it does not seem to support that wholeheartedly. Maybe three months or six months from now, there will be a new set of photos and a new peer review, and says the camera angles were not right, we adjusted this, or we compensated for the cuts, the grading that should have been there was not, and we got the tree count right, and then it becomes a different application than what we are seeing here today. Chairperson Maas: Right. I think when we developed the Specific Plan, we were so sensitive...I think because I was on the Commission then, we were so sensitive to that area and were so careful in its planning that we really did consider all the open space that was going to be left and the hillside, and it was very sensitive where those homes were going to placed. Driving out there today, I look at it and I certainly do not want to contribute to what is going on there. The architecture is out of place there. I just cannot jump on the wagon. I wish I could, but because of going through everything that I have, the Specific Plan and everything else, I cannot go there. Commissioner Fox: My comments are as follows. First of all, I do not think the dot means the existing garage that is on site would need to be demolished in order to build the new residential unit. I think it is similar to the dots on the North Sycamore Specific Plan when we talked about the trail and whether the alignment of the trail was exactly where it said it would be, or whether it was in that general area. So, I could support the house being built higher on the hill because I do not think it is feasible to build on the garage space. The other issue is that the barbed wire for the property line is right there at the back of the building. So I cannot fathom placing a residence there and believing that the dot meant the exact location on that map. So, I could support the house going higher up on the hill. 18