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Commercial parking, landmarks and creeks consumed the lion’s share of the Berkeley Planning Commission’s Wednesday night session, producing lots of talk and no decisive action save for one member’s abrupt walkout. 

Three members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) were on hand for the discussion of technical changes to the zoning ordinance to support a proposed new ordinance that would govern their actions. 

The revised Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO), undertaken at the request of the City Council, has been four years in the making. Deputy City Attorney Zach Cowan said part of what concerned the elected officials was the potential for legal liabilities posed by the current law. 

“Over the past four years, we went over the code issue by issue,” said Carrie Olson, LPC commissioner and former chair of the group. “Our goal was to ensure there was as little liability for the city as possible.” 

While the current statute limits the LPC’s review of the possibility of landmarking buildings proposed for demolition to consideration of non-residential structures older than 40 years, the revised draft would extend scrutiny to residential structures, but would apply only to buildings more than 50 years old. 

Berkeley Planning Director Dan Marks said the process “takes a lot of time.” 

His staff estimated that under the proposed revisions, the commission would have looked at 122 more buildings over the past year. 

“What this seems to do is that any sort of change becomes reviewable” by the LPC, said Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman. 

“As it’s currently written, the landmarks commission has authority over alterations but not demolition. This would give them authority over demolitions,” Cowan said. 

LPC member Adam Weiss defended the new ordinance, saying it “would frontload everything, so everyone would know from the beginning what they have to do...following a more understandable set of rules for the entire city.” 

Planning Commission Chair Harry Pollack faulted the revisions for putting the LPC “in the position of determining whether an application is complete, which is normally a staff decision. 

“There has to be a better solution,” he said. 

Cowan countered that the revisions don’t endow the LPC with that power. He described two other inaccurate characterizations of the effect of revisions, which appeared in a detailed communication from “smart growth” advocacy group Livable Berkeley, as “howlers”. 

Olson acknowledged that under the present regime, non-residential projects do appear on the LPC agenda, but “nearly all are passed over. Only about a half-dozen people write (landmark) applications, and I’m one. We’re not trying to search out landmarks ourselves. We are trying to pick them up early in the process” of development. 

Commissioners ended the hearing with clear signals that they would try to amend the proposed zoning changes before passing them on to the City Council, which has the final say on both on the zoning ordinance and on the LPO. 

Another hot potato on the planner’s agenda was the subject of parking for commercial businesses, an issue arising from the December, 2003 report of the Mayor’s Task Force on Permitting and Development, which identified parking issues as a barrier to new business. 

Because many commercial buildings have been restricted to single uses, any changes to new or multiple uses trigger a search for the new parking spaces mandated by the general standards for the district housing the building. 

The task force recommended changes in the zoning ordinance to waive the requirements when the new use fell under the same category as the old, and to grant discretionary powers to city staff and the Zoning Adjustments Board when changes involve new or multiple use categories. 

The staff proposal calls for a formal Commercial Parking Review involving a community stakeholder workshop and public hearings before submission of the proposed changes to the City Council. 

“Our view is that this is a very serious problem for us. In virtually all cases, providing parking on site is impossible. We’ve been asked to do this as a highest priority project,” said Planning Director Dan Marks. 

When Gene Poschman began questioning whether a proposed timeline for the process was realistic, commissioner Jerome Wiggins invoked the late and controversial New York City planning czar Robert Moses, drawing a barbed comment from Poschman.  

After commission Susan Wengraf accused Poschman of obstruction, Wiggins grabbed up his papers and stormed out of the meeting, declaring, “You micromanage the minutiae.” 

Poschman then moved to hold a workshop during the commission’s second October meeting, which immediately carried on a unanimous vote. 

The final incendiary on the agenda was the proposed revision to the city’s Creeks Ordinance, which governs property-owners’ responsibility for the city’s vast system of creeks buried in underground culverts. 

“What is going to be the responsibility of the Planning Commission?” mused Wengraf. “This is probably the most far-reaching land use issue for the city in a long time, and for the Planning Commission not to have a say” isn’t reasonable. 

Marks proposed a task force composed of stakeholders, including creek advocates and the property owners who would be forced to carry the heavy costs of repairing the crumbling concrete culverts buried deep beneath their homes and businesses. 

One of those who received a notice of a culvert beneath his home was Poschman, who regarded it as “as the kiss of death.” 

As a model, Marks held up the commission’s UC Hotel Task Force, which brought together a Planning Commission subcommittee and a collection of stakeholders to propose guidelines for the hotel, convention center and museums complex UC Berkeley has proposed for a two block area of downtown. 

The revisions will take at least two years to formulate, he said,. 

Pollack said he wanted the process to be handled by a subcommittee of planning commissioners, who would listen to the stakeholders as they appeared before them during a series of hearing. 

When Marks said it wasn’t clear who should have the leading role, commissioner David Tabb insisted that the planning board “should have more than an advisory role.” 

The commission then adjourned, leaving the matter for future meetings.?