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HomeMy WebLinkAbout05 - Final Tract Map No. 17555 for 3303 and 3355 Via Lido - CorrespondenceReceived After Agenda Printed January 9, 2018 Item No. 5 January 9, 2018, City Council Item 5 Comments The following comments on an item on the Newport Beach City Council agenda are submitted by: Jim Mosher ( iimmosher(cr-yahoo.com ), 2210 Private Road, Newport Beach 92660 (949-548-6229) Item 5. Final Tract Map No. 17555 for a 23 -Unit Residential Condominium Development Located at 3303 and 3355 Via Lido I feel singularly unqualified to comment on map approvals, and have to admire the Council members who fully understand what they are being asked to do. It seems a new map of an existing lot has to be approved to allow the sale of 23 future townhomes on it as individual condominiums. Yet the "subdivision" map seems only to define (or refine?) the boundary of the existing lot, and does not appear to show where the separately sold parts (if there are any?) would be. Equally puzzlingly to me, one of the key questions the Council members are being asked to decide is whether the Final Tract Map included as Attachment B to the staff report is "in substantial confonnance" with a Tentative Tract Map approved by a November 12, 2013, Council resolution, but (as best I can tell) the earlier resolution is provided (as Attachment D), but not the earlier map. I am unsure how common citizens like the new Council members (none of whom participated in the earlier approval) can be expected to make this determination without seeing the map approved by the earlier Council and without having a staff report that gives them a much better understanding than the present staff report of the questions of surveying that (I assume) must be involved in making such a decision. Otherwise, it is really the staff that is making the decision, and the Council is just rubber-stamping it. With regard to the Subdivision Agreement (in Attachment C), which is one of the few parts of this matter I am partly able to understand, the one-year warranty on the public improvements we are asking the developer to build seems awfully short to me. Shouldn't we expect things like sidewalks to last longer than a year before failing? Finally, since the 2012 California Supreme Court decision in Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, LLC v. City of Los Angeles, 55 Cal.4th 783, the City has recognized that subdivision in the Coastal Zone requires a Coastal Development Permit (see, for example, Item 2 -- 302 Iris Avenue Residence Tentative Parcel Map and Coastal Development Permit — at the Thursday, January 11, Zoning Administrator hearing). This matter is in the Coastal Zone and it has subdivision written all over it, so I am wondering if the CDP for that aspect of the development has ever been approved. I can find nothing about that in the hearing materials from when what I assume is the still -contemplated construction was approved by the Coastal Commission as Item Th10d at their October 2014 hearing. That is, the CDP approved then seemed to cover a request for construction rather than for subdivision. If the CDP approving the subdivision needs a finding that the development allowed by it is in full conformity with the City's current certified Local Coastal Program, there could possibly be a problem which the present Council may wish to be aware of: The 2013 Council allowed deviations from what since this January have been the generic LCP development standards for January 9, 2018, City Council Item 5 Comments - Jim Mosher Page 2 of 2 multi -family residential development in the Coastal Zone by declaring this 1.2 acre project to be a "planned community" (PC -59) — even though it is much smaller than the 10 acre minimum recommended in Title 20 of the Municipal Code. Although the map in the LCP Implementation Plan certified in January (Title 21 of our Municipal Code), shows a PC -59 on this property, whether through inadvertence of not, it lists no special development standards for it. A City request to add to the City's certified IP the special standards necessary to justify the Coastal Commission's previously -approved construction was considered by the Coastal Commission as Item Th11a at their November 2017 meeting (see the first item in the exhibit to the CCC staff report). But as shown in an addendum to the staff report, the matter was not resolved in November, and has been continued to a later meeting (as it would not only allow the previously approved construction, but would allow future development on that site to the same relaxed standards). In summary, if there could in the future be legal issues about the absence of a clear CDP allowing the subdivision, and in that connection conformity of the contemplated development with the current LCP-IP, it might be wise for the City to defer this item until after the problem with enshrining the special "planned community" standards in the IP has been resolved (as it may have intended, thinking that problem would have been solved in November)