01-27-2014 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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, , #13-3637 January 24,2014 Page 5 One option for consolidating documents may be for the developer to establish the easements and restrictions within neighborhood covenants; the downside is that they may get `buried' and are not as readily discernible to a buyer as separate documents; and when incorporated into neighborhood covenants there must be language that makes them permanently applicable and not able to be changed without City approval. Under the current plat layout, the individual easement documents have to be filed in the title of each lot affected. If the wetlands and preservation areas were in an outlot owned by a Homeowners Association, the complexity created by multiple documents would decrease. The simplest option might be for the wetland and tree preservation areas to be platted as a single outlot to be owned by the Citv, in which case certain easements would not be required. However, that would be a distinct departure from past City practice. The City philosophy has for decades been that the City doesn't want to own wetlands or little snippets of conservation areas scattered around the City. An added complexity in merely combining the documents into one is that while there is some overlap in the easement language between the City's standard drainage easement and the standard wetland F&C easement, they have somewhat different goals. The City's standard Wetland C&F easement is intended to convey to the City "the right to restrict and Declarant agrees to limit and preclude the use, improvement and development" of the protected area per a set of listed conditions or covenants, and gives the City the right to "remove...any structures, uses, materials, substances, or unnatural matter inconsistent with the covenants". The standard Drainage easement, on the other hand, gives the City the right to have water flow across the easement area, and to "remove trees, brush, grass, dirt and other structures" and to "construct, maintain, repair, reconstruct and use drainageways and other improvements" as well as the right of entry to do so. In other words, the wetland easement prohibits the developer and property owners from doing damage to the wetland, while the drainage easement allows the City to maintain drainage through it. Quite often part or all of a wetland also functions for drainage purposes (which is the case for the proposed Oliver Hill plat) and the wetland C&F Easement and Drainage Easement areas overlap or are exactly the same area. However, if/when the wetland easement description includes wetland buffers (a potential additional easement required by the MCWD now rather than the City), the wetland, wetland buffer, and area needed for drainage might each have different sets of restrictions or conditions attached, which makes for a more complex document when combined into one. As of this writing, staff does not have a strict recommendation for consolidating the various easement documents that will or may be required of this plat. We are willing to entertain a proposal by the developer's attorney to incorporate certain of the required elements into a neighborhood covenant. This has been done with some past developments in Orono.