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ANALYSIS <br />Two of the three tasks assigned to Community Development involve land development regulations <br />(LDRs). LDR changes involve a formal process that requires a public hearing before the Planning <br />and Zoning Commission (PZC) and a public hearing before the Board. The third task involves <br />development review fees. Changing those fees requires only Board review and adoption of new fees <br />via a resolution. <br />• Landscape Regulation Changes <br />With respect to the first item regarding existing landscaping regulations (LDR Chapter 926) those <br />regulations were most recently revised in 2010 with input from the development industry, the <br />landscape industry, and the environmental community. The 2010 revisions included a number of <br />changes that added flexibility to the regulations such as allowing a range of planting heights that <br />average out overall to meet. plant height minimums. Recently, two additional landscaping <br />requirement "flexibility" items have been suggested. Those include codifying an allowance for <br />varying plant heights for littoral zone plantings along pond shorelines (a practice already used by <br />staff), and allowing a minor reduction in initial plant height for plants used to in -fill gaps in <br />preserved, native buffer areas. Staff has drafted landscape ordinance and littoral zone planting <br />regulation changes for those two concepts and supports moving forward with formal changes to <br />Chapter 926 and Chapter 934 (see attachment #2). <br />• Temporary Suspensions of Compliance <br />The second item deals with use of temporary suspensions at the end of project construction. <br />Although the existing temporary suspension of compliance provisions are popular and useful, staff <br />has identified a need to curtail requests to eliminate certain items that are causing an inordinate <br />amount of staff and applicant time spent resolving punch list items and follow-up after -the -fact. To <br />address that problem, staff proposes to amend the existing temporary suspension regulations <br />(Chapter 902) to provide more specificity that will guide staff and applicants, while adhering to the <br />temporary suspension's original purpose of allowing certificates of occupancy and certificates of <br />completion when a project has been inspected and deemed substantially complete with only "minor <br />deficiencies" remaining. <br />Staff's proposed changes to Chapter 902 will add to the temporary suspension regulations a list of <br />minor "suspend -able" items and a list of items not considered minor and not suspend -able. Although <br />the lists are not all-inclusive, adopting those lists into the code will provide specific guidance for <br />most end -of -project circumstances (see attachment 43). In addition to the proposed code changes, <br />staff is proposing a nominal fee for a temporary suspension request ($100). Such fee will cover only <br />a portion of staff costs for the extra administrative and inspection time devoted to servicing the <br />requests, but will provide developers a small incentive for following the normal process, 100% <br />completion of all required items, for obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy (C.O.) or Certificate of <br />Completion (C.C.). <br />CAUserAGRANIC-1 WppData\Local\Temp\BCL Technologies\easyPDF 7\@BCL@340595C8\@BCL@340595C8.docx 2 <br />P172 <br />