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| Submitted comments will appear below after staff approval. | |
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| Miles Garrod | 12/1/2022 11:16:14 AM |
| The stated priority of the rewrite's frontage menu in the design standards is to include items that good design would incorporate anyway. However the menu is too restrictive and renders many good buildings downtown legally non-conforming. This makes improvements to existing buildings much more complicated given the provisions of 21.13 regarding "Bringing Characteristics of Use into Compliance" Because downtown' problems are not architectural, this added complexity may yield no return. Alaskan buildings are already burdened with more daunting upgrades than other locales given advances in thermal efficiency and seismic requirements. We shouldn't add marginal cost and complexity that makes it more likely for a building to be neglected and fall into disuse or replacement with parking. | |
| Miles Garrod | 12/1/2022 11:01:36 AM |
| A stated goal of the "Our Downtown" plan and this rewrite is to simplify the bonus table. In the rewrite, the bonus table is eliminated and replaced with a design menu that applies regardless of scale. This makes the largest scale of development easier, but yields a net increase of complexity for small-to-medium-scale development and improvements to existing buildings. Tying code complexity to larger scale as in the current code makes intuitive sense. I welcome the simplification from bonus formulas to design menu, but I recommend that the design menu only apply beyond a certain height or FAR. | |