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MINUTES OF THE <br />ORONO PLANNING COMMISSION <br />February 21, 2023 <br />6:00 o'clock p.m. <br />commission as well as the City Council to have a review process of how this looks. We maybe can't go <br />back based on the amount of dirt that was removed. I'm fairly certain that what we're looking at there <br />from the original walls to what's new are not in-kind. They're a different footprint. They're different <br />angles and different places on the hillside. So my initial thought is also the precedents that we set to then <br />go back and approve and after -the -fact variance, because I worry does that say `go ahead and do what you <br />wantT And then we're going to have to say, `Oh, well, we're stuck with it now'. I worry about the <br />precedents and what that sets for our City. We've got a lot of bluff and hillside to protect around the lake <br />and that might be a slippery slope, pardon the pun. <br />Bollis said he definitely has the same concerns as Commissioner Kirschner. Typically, when you're doing <br />a project like this, if you can't build in-kind for whatever reason, it's great to come back here. But looking <br />at it as a situation where it's imminent that there's going to be a problem, I question whether it could have <br />even been built in-kind. We don't know what those existing walls were. We don't know if they even met <br />code as far as what the new walls have to meet and are engineered by. So all the information I have, I feel <br />like the new system is definitely engineered, signed off on. We don't even know what the old system was. <br />I feel like the contractor did a good job dealing with the problem that they had there. It's just unfortunate <br />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 <br />halfway through the winter and not be able to do anything. And then we'd have a huge problem this <br />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 <br />think either way, if the engineer says it works, if there's a seventh wall or just raising that sixth wall, I'm <br />fine with the proposed raising the sixth wall and doing the appropriate grading. I guess the question for <br />staff would be I don't know if that would require a railing. <br />Curtis said the City's building official could be asked to comment on that and clarify with the applicant if <br />a railing is required by state code before it goes to the City Council. <br />Libby said he tends to favor several remarks that Commissioner Kirschner mentioned. One is that I think <br />it was a poorly -conceived plan to start with; it did not get enough review. And I think that once you get a <br />stop order, it's a flag. Not to defend the City Council, but when you have an approval, and then <br />something different than what was approved is built or constructed with very little interaction with the <br />City engineering, it's a formula for failure. Because for one thing, you created a slope that didn't exist <br />before. And in the spirit of conservation and preservation, not only within the scope of our empirical <br />bluffs ordinance, you have the protection of the lake itself. And I think that those were not centrally <br />focused on how the engineer designed this with very little consulting or approval in that plan and design <br />and engineering with the City. So trying to remove a little fault from the City, I defer to Mrs. Price's very <br />sage wisdom as a credentialed individual looking at this kind of from the outside, that there was too little <br />analysis to really look to not have the disaster that I think this really is. I think that what they really need <br />to do is recreate the bluff wall at the top that they previously had. First of all, you could have a straight <br />fence. It would be helpful, but no one knows that, not even the contractors, who know how to operate the <br />machines and move the dirt in the soil and bring the portions of the wall out that needed to be removed. <br />There really are not enough statistical solid metrics to really determine how this really should have been <br />done and how to fix it. I'm not really in favor of approving any of this. Even with the staff suggestion, the <br />two suggestions that I made, I think really should go back to a planning stage with the original engineer <br />who should have done more due diligence with the City engineer, so they know that as they move <br />Page 8 of 19 <br />