03-13-2023 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO PLANNING COMMISSION February 21, 2023 6:00 o’clock p.m. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 8 of 12 commission as well as the City Council to have a review process of how this looks. We maybe can't go back based on the amount of dirt that was removed. I’m fairly certain that what we're looking at there from the original walls to what's new are not in-kind. They're a different footprint. They're different angles and different places on the hillside. So my initial thought is also the precedents that we set to then go back and approve and after-the-fact variance, because I worry does that say ‘go ahead and do what you want?’ And then we're going to have to say, ‘Oh, well, we're stuck with it now’. I worry about the precedents and what that sets for our City. We've got a lot of bluff and hillside to protect around the lake and that might be a slippery slope, pardon the pun. Bollis said he definitely has the same concerns as Commissioner Kirschner. Typically, when you're doing a project like this, if you can't build in-kind for whatever reason, it's great to come back here. But looking at it as a situation where it's imminent that there's going to be a problem, I question whether it could have even been built in-kind. We don't know what those existing walls were. We don't know if they even met code as far as what the new walls have to meet and are engineered by. So all the information I have, I feel like the new system is definitely engineered, signed off on. We don't even know what the old system was. I feel like the contractor did a good job dealing with the problem that they had there. It's just unfortunate it didn't come up here. Or it wasn't able to come here because I wouldn't have wanted to stop and then get halfway through the winter and not be able to do anything. And then we'd have a huge problem this spring, if that were the case. So I think it's probably fortunate that it got built to the extent that that it did. I think either way, if the engineer says it works, if there's a seventh wall or just raising that sixth wall, I'm fine with the proposed raising the sixth wall and doing the appropriate grading. I guess the question for staff would be I don't know if that would require a railing. Curtis said the City’s building official could be asked to comment on that and clarify with the applicant if a railing is required by state code before it goes to the City Council. Libby said he tends to favor several remarks that Commissioner Kirschner mentioned. One is that I think it was a poorly-conceived plan to start with; it did not get enough review. And I think that once you get a stop order, it's a flag. Not to defend the City Council, but when you have an approval, and then something different than what was approved is built or constructed with very little interaction with the City engineering, it's a formula for failure. Because for one thing, you created a slope that didn't exist before. And in the spirit of conservation and preservation, not only within the scope of our empirical bluffs ordinance, you have the protection of the lake itself. And I think that those were not centrally focused on how the engineer designed this with very little consulting or approval in that plan and design and engineering with the City. So trying to remove a little fault from the City, I defer to Mrs. Price’s very sage wisdom as a credentialed individual looking at this kind of from the outside, that there was too little analysis to really look to not have the disaster that I think this really is. I think that what they really need to do is recreate the bluff wall at the top that they previously had. First of all, you could have a straight fence. It would be helpful, but no one knows that, not even the contractors, who know how to operate the machines and move the dirt in the soil and bring the portions of the wall out that needed to be removed. There really are not enough statistical solid metrics to really determine how this really should have been done and how to fix it. I'm not really in favor of approving any of this. Even with the staff suggestion, the two suggestions that I made, I think really should go back to a planning stage with the original engineer who should have done more due diligence with the City engineer, so they know that as they move