OLYMPIC MEETING OF THE P&Z BOARD

In keeping with Olympic theme of the days:

The gold medal goes to Mr. Alberts for providing new and compelling factual testimony to help the P&Z board understand why they had approved previous PAR plans (with regard to parking only) but should not approve 216 Pine Avenue. After careful analyses of the regulations that were in force, prior to the original PAR applications, he determined they had been amended to remove ambiguous language that was interpreted to allow the frontage to serve as one large driveway. This was a win-win, the city did not do anything wrong before and it was not bound by precedent now.

The Silver Medal goes to Mr. Pytel who was tenacious as a terrier in trying to make others understand the concept of density and how it had been derived. He was supported by an expert witness, an attorney and ironically the P&Z Board Chairperson who had the same recollections, yet failed to support him.

The Bronze Medal goes to Ms. Jenkins who spunkily put Dye in his place by saying (paraphrase) How could they be telling me something when I just told you they were asking me questions, they didn't know anything. I told them to come to the meeting.

On a more serious note there are some important points from this meeting:

- With Mr. Stover at the helm of P&Z it is ever more important that the City Commissioners take over approval of major site plans. He lost control of the meeting and the applicant's attorney took full advantage of this, interjecting at will. Not sure how many years he has sat on the board but he appeared to have no grasp of the procedures or protocol.

- The applicant's attorney told the board they did not have to listen to the testimony from the citizen's since it had no "weight" she then discounted a citizen's expert witness saying he says he's a planner or something. Important to note: Mr. Dye woke up from his stupor and did his job by noting that the citizen's testimony did have weight as long as they were entering facts into evidence not opinions. Every citizen who spoke entered facts into evidence, several did interject opinion but it was easy to tell the difference. If you were listening!

-The applicant's 2nd seat attorney who claimed to specialize in Comp Plans told Mr. Pytel that it is her strongly held opinion / position that density was by region not by lot because of how she parsed the language. She cited no case law to show how courts looked at comp plan language when it was so constructed, so it must be her opinion.

The Booby Prize is a tie between Mr. Stover for his total inability to manage the meeting and his fixation on a plan that was not in evidence and has no traction in the community. He did not listen to a thing that was said.

OR

Ms Mattick who said, more than once, it doesn't matter if we're wrong about the density then the developer has to tear it down, it doesn't affect us. Tony Arrant told us about this big case where they had to tear down an apartment building. If you don't care if you are wrong and will not consider fact you need to resign.