08-13-2012 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL Monday, August 13, 2012 7:00 o'clock p.m. (S. #10-3491 CITY OF ORONO - HARDCOVER REGULATIONS AMENDMENT, Continued) are a few properties that appear to be right on the lake but are not included in Tier 1 at the present time. That is basically because the areas either have a small stretch of land, a road, or some other feature between that lot and the actual OHW. Those particular areas will be addressed in Step 2 of the analysis. Step two of the process identifies the primary building area on the lot. The primary building area is identified by either the principal structure or existing structure on the lot as well as the setbacks of adjacent structures if you are looking at a vacant parcel. If the primary building area is completely within the 250 -foot buffer around a lake, then the parcel, under Step 2, would also be placed into Tier 1. The next part of Step 2 deals with properties whose primary building areas are divided by the 250 -foot buffer. In those cases, if the adjacent properties have already been placed into Protection Tier 1, then those parcels would also be placed into Tier 1. If the adjacent properties have not been assigned into a protection tier, further analysis would be done. Gozola stated they then identified the primary building areas on each of the lots. If you overlay the 250 -foot buffer on to the map, you can see that three of these building areas are divided by that particular zone. Since all of these parcels are adjacent to Tier 1 properties, they would also be assigned to Tier 1. The parcel that has its primary building area outside of the 250 -foot buffer would be examined in subsequent steps. The end result of that analysis shows the changes in the map. Step 3 continues to focus on the primary building area and its distance from the OHWL on the parcels that have yet to be assigned to a protection tier. If any portion of the primary building area is within 300 feet of a protected stream or if it is touching the landward extent of a floodplain from a stream, then it is placed into Tier 2. Likewise, if a portion of a primary building area is between the distance of 250 feet and 500 feet from protected lakeshore, the property is also placed into Tier 2. Finally, parcels, with a primary building area beyond 500 feet from lakes but up to 1,000 feet are placed into Tier 3. All of the remaining unassigned parcels would again be continued to be examined under the subsequent steps. Gozola stated as an example, the property that is bisected by the 500 -foot divider and has a portion of its primary building area within that 250 -to 500 foot zone would be assigned to Tier 2. Because the other homes are outside of the 500 -foot buffer, those would be assigned to Tier 3. Step 4 continues to examine unassigned parcels by looking at the zoning districts for each of those parcels. If the zoning on the parcel happens to be RPUD, then it is placed into Protection Tier 4. Industrial is placed into Protection Tier 5. Unassigned parcels continue to be examined. The final analysis step is designed to fill in gaps within the system. Essentially it includes areas that are surrounded by already regulated parcels that by chance are not being regulated but should be regulated given that they have as much impact on the water quality of the area as the surrounding parcels. Gozola stated there is no magic number to define what the gap is so Staff determined that a reasonable gap would be 20 acres. Gozola indicated under Step 5 he first looked at those parcels individually. If more than half of the parcel's border was being regulated by one or more of the protection tiers, then that parcel was assigned to the tier which abutted it by the greatest percentage. The next step was to look for gaps of 20 acres or less and those were analyzed similar to the other individual parcels. If more than half of the gap's overall border was being regulated by one of the protection tiers, then the entire gap was assigned to the tier which abutted it by the greatest percentage. Parcels that were still unassigned following Step 5 were deemed to be exempt from the stormwater quality overlay district. Page 4 of 19