A borrow pit asks to put its trucks on a local road Thursday

Six items go to the Planning and Zoning Agency on Thursday, and four of them come down to how vehicles get to a place and where they go afterward.

The agency meets at 1:30 p.m. in the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View. What it can do varies by item. On a special use permit the code is direct: “A Special Use shall be approved by the Planning and Zoning Agency,” and the agency issues a final order with conditions attached. On a rezoning it writes a report and recommendation to the commission, and the code says that recommendation “shall be advisory only and shall not be construed to be binding upon the Board of County Commissioners.”

Either way there is a route past it. An applicant, the county administrator or an adversely affected party may appeal a final decision of the agency to the commission within 30 days of the signed final order, and the commission’s decision is the county’s last word before circuit court. Here is what the agenda says, in the order it says it.

The borrow pit, and the sentence it needs varied

Items 2 and 3 are the same pit and they arrive together, which is the tell that one will not work without the other. A borrow pit is a hole somebody digs to sell the dirt, and fill has to come from somewhere, so in a county putting in this many roads and pads it comes out of pits like this one, hauled by truck. The Land Development Code permits a dry excavation as a special use in three zoning districts: Open Rural, Industrial Warehouse and Public Service.

The variance in item 2 is to Section 2.03.10.A.3.a, and the agenda describes it as a request “to allow for direct access to a Borrow Pit operation from a Local roadway in lieu of an Arterial, Minor, or Major Collector roadway.”

Read the section itself and the wording matters. It says land excavations and borrow areas “shall be encouraged to locate in areas which have direct access to the receiving site of the excavated materials, with direct access to Arterials or Minor or Major Collectors, within approved subdivision and site Development projects under Construction, adjacent to public improvement projects such as new road corridors or in conjunction with stormwater utility projects.”

Encouraged, not required, is how the code puts it. What turns an encouragement into a condition is the permit, and that is item 3.

Item 3 is a request to revise the final order of SUPMAJ 2022-12 “by modifying conditions limiting site access.” A special use permit carries conditions and the conditions are the price of the permit. This pit was approved in 2022 with conditions on how its trucks get in and out, and item 3 asks to change those conditions while item 2 clears the code provision sitting underneath them.

The same section of the code sets a setback of 150 feet from a publicly owned local road for a dry excavation, and 200 feet from an arterial or collector. It also lists what may be required to mitigate hauling: restrictions on the hours and days trucks run, a contribution from the applicant toward road improvements on the haul route, and the development of alternative haul routes.

None of that predicts a recommendation. The agenda does not carry a staff recommendation, does not name the receiving site for the fill, and does not state which local road the trucks would use or how many of them there would be. Those are the four things a resident on that road would want, and none of them is published.

Grand Oaks: 45 fewer units, and different language about traffic

Item 6 asks to modify the Grand Oaks planned unit development, adopted as Ordinance 2018-40. A PUD is a custom set of zoning rules a builder negotiates in place of the standard ones, and its master development plan is the document that binds it.

The request has four parts. Reduce the maximum number of residential units from 999 to 954. Modify language within the master development plan text regarding traffic mitigation requirements. Modify the plan map to revise site access and update phasing. Correct inconsistencies in the text.

Forty-five units come off the ceiling, which is a reduction of roughly 4.5 percent on the approved count. That percentage is ours, not the county’s.

The traffic mitigation language is the part worth reading when it appears. A unit count is a number and it is easy to check later. Mitigation language in a master development plan text is the sentence that says what the builder owes on the road, and when it changes, the two changes are not the same size just because they travel in the same item.

The agenda does not say what the current language requires or what the proposed language would require. There is no staff report published with it.

Durbin Park, again

Item 5 is the companion to what the commission takes up on Tuesday morning. It adds a maximum of 330 single-family units to Mixed-Use Parcel E on the east side of Interstate 95, modifies residential setbacks there, and reduces the maximum multi-family count from 2,265 to 1,520.

Those two multi-family figures are 745 apart, and 745 is the number of apartments the commission is asked Tuesday to trade for 330 houses at a fixed evening trip count. The exchange table that makes them equal is here.

The event venue, and the house on Atlantic View

Item 1 asks for a special use permit for an event venue with unpaved parking at 5381 Don Manuel Road, under the general special use criteria at Section 2.03.01.A and under 2.03.15.D. Unpaved parking at an event venue is a traffic and drainage question before it is anything else, and the agenda says nothing about how many cars.

Item 4 is small and worth naming as small: a request to put an aluminum patio cover over an existing third-floor deck, which needs a front-yard setback of 23 feet where the code requires 25.

Two pages

Two pages is what the county publishes for a Planning and Zoning meeting. The file is posted under a name that says it includes staff packets and it does not; the Sept. 3 agenda is two pages under the same name. So the practice is consistent rather than an oversight this once, and it is a different practice from the commission’s, where the Clerk posts the full packet with every attachment and one item on Tuesday’s agenda runs to 146 pages.

The concurrency question has no answer here. Neither major modification’s agenda entry states a level of service finding, a trip count, or whether transportation staff objects, and the two access items carry no haul route and no truck volume. Anyone who wants those before Thursday has to ask the county for them.

If you own property within 300 feet of any of these parcels, the code says you should already have had a letter. Mailed notice goes out not less than 15 business days before the hearing, the notice is published once in a county newspaper, and the county puts a sign on the parcel on each street side. The same owner list gets reused for the commission hearing when there is one.

Planning and Zoning Agency, Thursday, Sept. 17, 1:30 p.m., County Auditorium, 500 San Sebastian View. Public comment comes at the top of the meeting, before the items.