 all right all right welcome everyone to the april meeting of the columbia city of columbia board of zoning appeals i'm catherine fenner vice chair for the board and we'll be serving as chair for today's meeting at the time i would like to introduce the other members of the board let's see we've got jonathan vang um c macintosh davis widdle and we may be seeing sherard draval but we don't know i would also like to introduce the staff that assists the board that would be hope hasty zoning administrator the board is charged with hearing applications for special exceptions variances and administrative appeals all testimony is recorded for the record and anyone wishing to speak will need to be sworn in and come to the podium to speak no testimony can be taken from the floor when you come to the podium state your name and please speak clearly into the microphone because this meeting is being recorded applicants with cases before the board are allotted a presentation time of 10 minutes this time also includes all persons presenting information on behalf of the applicant this time limit does not include any questions asked by the board or staff regarding the case any member of the public may address the board in intervals of three minutes or five minutes if by a spokesperson for an established body or group of three or more the applicant then has five minutes for a bottle the board reserves the right to amend these limits on a case-by-case basis those of you who plan to speak must be sworn if you are here as an applicant or here to speak on any case please stand at this time and raise your right hand but you don't have to actually stand do you affirm or attest that the testimony you give today will be the truth and nothing but the truth at this time i will turn the meeting over to miss hasty all right thank you good afternoon so today we will start out with the consent agenda and we just have one item on the consent agenda that's the approval of the march 7th meeting minutes do i have a motion to approve the consent agenda do i have a second second all in favor all right all right all right moving on we've got one case on regular agenda today this is a variance um 2024-0001 v it's for 38 27 divine street and it's a variance to the maximum wall height standard and you will find the details of that request in your packets and as well as some photos and site plan and the applicant is here to present his request all right if you could come forward and present your case we're interested what do you got richard ledson um i gave you a complete package at least from my view so i hope it was self-explanatory if you had a chance to look at it um you need to speak closer to the microphone or can we can't turn the volume up i guess i think it's on is it on now is it on it's not very loud compared to mine i'll switch testing testing oh that's fine yeah yeah that's fine you just gotta lean over lean over it's not for taller people i guess all right so um the basis for the uh request is that our yard used to actually be in the middle of what divine street is today and through imminent domain it's been chopped away over the years and uh now it's five lanes of steady traffic and it's been pretty bad um it's it's an awful lot of traffic we get an awful lot of accidents come through our yard we at that corner that you're looking at we used to have three 50 foot trees but they've been hit so many times that i had to have them taken out because i thought they'd fall in the road and kill somebody so um what i'd like to do is build a wall along here that will give us the privacy and the security that we're looking for and hopefully reduce some of the noise um we have a fire station down divine street about five blocks and our our personal joke is that they serve us everything between us and myrtle beach because they're running by constantly um so anyway that that's what we're looking for some security some privacy and protection from the cars that seem to want to drive through our yard all the time so we're allowed to build a three foot wall obviously that's not going to do it we're looking to build an eight foot wall with uh nine foot columns and that's going to be a 15 foot increment we have identified the setback off of abelia as you're going through you'll see yeah that's that's kind of what we want it to look like um we can build up to the back side of the sidewalk which is our current property line along divine and then when we get closer to our divine street entrance as you can see on the page left we'll step the wall back so that it'll allow a car to come off divine street and not interfere with traffic while we're trying to get our gate to open um and hopefully it'll also provide our mailman a little more safety because right now he he just risks his life every day he just works on divine street right in front of our house and delivers mail so we'll give him a little area to pull off and relocate our mailbox for him as well so that's what we're looking at um we have to uh put a concrete foundation obviously because the height of the wall um the only thing that I ask that is in addition to the wall height is I'd like to put a ballard page right uh you can see it in plan I believe it's listed just so after we spend the money to build this wall I'd like to keep somebody from hitting it if possible and that would actually be in the city property that's a setback that's allowed on the Abilia is a city road and so we have that five foot setback off the walkway so the ballard would actually fall into that area so that's the only thing that's unusual over other than the height when I was talking with the zoning folks they also were concerned about the visibility um it's not online but they gave me a 25 foot from a corner of a lot visibility line uh that one right there it has never been there before we had trees there forever but what I did was I went and drove up to the intersection and I had built up a a mock-up of the column that we're going to put and placed it on the corner so that I could take a photo from inside the car and looking now we have the benefit that Divine Street kind of curves away from Abilia on both directions so when you pull up front on Abilia when you pull up to enter Divine Street looking left you can see clearly all the way down the hill and looking right you can see all the way to the intersection in the traffic light that's at Kilburn so we don't feel like we're impinging any visibility or creating a dangerous thing and we had our neighbors look at it we went and presented it to all of our neighbors that were available and and they said okay great you know so you should have some letters in this packet as well saying that they like it so that's my case if you have any questions for me I'm here to answer do we have questions yeah I have one um have you called 811 and see if there's any utility conflicts many times in the past I haven't recently there is a water line that runs to the house that's midpoint and so I have to build a bridge over top of that because the actual water meter is half on the sidewalk and half on my property so I'm aware of that and I'm going to have that redone and we'll build over it and make sure that they have access to it so so as of right you can have a three-foot wall is that correct so um just to clarify it's yeah so he's on a corner lot so the requirement is four feet for the front yard um and you can have six on a secondary front um but what he's referring to is this this diagram that you see here um that's any area basically coming from the intersection that's the two streets 25 feet back to create that triangle that's the site visibility triangle and that's where you're not supposed to have anything between the three and eight feet and height just for visibility reasons so that falls under the height section with the fences and walls as well so it's kind of the same it falls under the height request so but if his actual wall that he's proposing to build that is eight feet high yes he could of right build one four feet you say yes in the front in the front on one side four and on one side six he could do so along the divine street side he could build four and on the abelia side six yes we would typically um go with divine as the the primary frontage because of the volume of traffic so can you switch back to the photos that I took sure the one of the do you tell me when to stop I don't know which ones you want to address these are just the accidents that end up in our yard yeah those are some there's another photo somewhere that that's yeah there we go okay so inside a car pulled up to the picture on the right um what I did was I built a plywood box that emulated the nine foot column put it on the corner that where we're going to place it so you can see that when you pull up to the intersection you can see all the way to the uh to the light at Kilburn and when you're looking the other way like I said it turns away from abelian you can see all the way down the hill I guess to me the only thing the concern I have that eight feet seems really really high um um I'm thinking about in my neighborhood University Hill um I know people have built walls and they were more like six feet um it seems like that would give you some protection I don't know eight feet just feels like a lot well our neighbors have one that's 10 feet um that's a matter of fact what the neighbor where went right there and that's on corner of Kilburn and divine oh oh oh oh yeah okay all right you know that house I know exactly which one yes seven and a half yeah then the neighbors down the other way have one that's seven feet high the thing that um it's probably not apparent to a passerby is that the height from where you come out of the house to the sidewalk drops off 17 inches um so when we end up re landscaping this and putting it level that what's eight feet to divine street is actually about six feet to us okay and we have on top of that we have a porch that's about three feet up from that so from that point it's three feet up so uh to us it's not eight feet and um we get we get an awful lot of people that come along divine street that don't always have the best of intentions true well that's funny because I know that one with the the the white wall and I never noticed the wall behind it so there's actually a picture of um typically what they do I'm I'm going to end up going to DOT and asking if we can get a light on that corner as well um but typically they come up and I guess they lose control because they don't anticipate that curve and so they run they run almost through our entire yard just mowing down everything in their path and there's a couple of pictures where they actually went through that wall yeah so they went through our yard down all of our stuff and it went through our driveway and through his wall um so yeah so yeah there's a I'm from achon and there's a on whiskey road there there's a famous wall a beautiful curved wall that keeps getting taken out time and time again they put bollards in and people still manage to avoid the bollards and take out the wall so I feel for you I still have hope for you I do want to note one thing about the bollard he mentioned the bollard and I'm not sure where you would want to place that but it sounds like that would probably be in the right of way somewhere beyond the property line so that would not be in our under our purview right right and it's it's at the corner in the in that little yeah right I got you okay wow all right any more discussion questions all right do you have a question oh yes just to make sure that I'm tracking along so what did you end up the actual setback being from Abelia to that that's a great question because the city has given me multiple answers but I did find an iron pin and so depending on how far back in time you go they used to measure from the center of Abelia then it was a curb then it was inside the sidewalk which I believe is what they're using now so it's five feet from inside of sidewalk because that's where I found the pin they aren't pin so I've assumed that much of a setback sorry the setback with the zoning is really almost from the street right so like there's in terms of line of sight right are you referring to the setback or the sight visibility triangle the sight visibility triangle and so that's so how far is the wall yes set back how close are we to that 25 feet yeah because there's a scale on there yes that's the diagram from the UDO um what I'm asking is where the column actually lands in that 20 right on that corner see there 25 did we make it to 25 or are we at 18 because there is a drawing sense but the site plan is not uh let's see okay yeah there we go yeah the rendered the rendered site plan has a 25 foot sort of marked on it but my understanding is that it comes from the property line so as you're looking at this you can see um that that property line is about five feet inset from the face of the sidewalk the inside edge of sidewalk right so how far does that put you from the road you know we're going to be just inside of that so I'm not going to quibble about feet but it's we're going to put the column on the corner of the property line essentially you know give or take a foot so that's the full 25 feet and that's why I took that photograph because as you can see as you pull up here like I say the road bends around and starts to go back this way so you can you can see well it's not particularly clear in this version but uh you can see all the way the traffic lights so you can see oncoming cars on the far line easily you can see all the cars on the close lane all the way up to the light and you can see all the way down the down the highway the other way so you don't have a 25 foot I do not that's that's one of the things we're asking for but like I said up until a year ago we had massive amounts of shrubbery and trees that were in excess of three feet high within that 25 foot triangle you know you can see before and after the tree yeah so well I threw that picture in to show you um one of them that we were taking down the trees so you could see that they actually were there that I'm not fibbing I don't know it's not my area you know you have a question you can certainly put it I think uh one of the things to note here is if you know we do approve this and say something there's an accident or somebody were to get hurt and they're like well we had these safeguards at 25 foot corner and we said that's fine and then somebody did get hurt it could come back to bite us well what you would allow is me to build a three foot wall so they would hit the wall anyway I think it's the uh the vis I mean I I'm personally not opposed to this um I think it'll be a great project I just want to make sure that we're covering all our bases I understand but like I say I would be allowed under the current zoning um laws to uh build my three foot wall within that same area so they're gonna hit that that's why I gave you some diagrams to show you that I'm gonna build a um concrete back up to the brick because I can't have them coming through the yard killing us I mean we've we've had near misses too many times so I understood do we have other questions from the board would is there anyone else who would like to speak to this batter she's with me okay all right um then testimony is closed and let's begin board discussion would anyone like to start sure okay so first off I really appreciate the aesthetic quality of your wall um sometimes we have eight foot fences come before us and I really struggle with those um but with the cutbacks it maintains you know some pedestrian friendliness even though that's a really pedestrian unfriendly place to be um all that being said I feel like if we could just tweak that design to maintain the visibility um and so that's why I was going back and saying okay what are we really asking for and what are the pieces of the variance and so I think I'm okay with the height variance but it needs to respect the visibility triangle and I feel like you're very close to that you know with just a a nip on the corner that that could be achieved so that's and that would be an option if the board chose to do so is to approve the height but with the stipulation or condition that the corner that corner be kept under three feet it's just you're welcome to gift come forward though so everybody can hear you while I appreciate your point of view I'm really not willing to go that way that's going to be sacrificing a huge amount of our yard which we have already sacrificed to the city for the benefit of the city over the years um that's 25 by 25 foot chunk of my yard that has been forested for a very long time that you're asking me to sacrifice I'm looking to get rid of my line of sight that looks at the traffic coming in the amount of smog and pollution and wind and sound that comes at me so dropping that down to three feet will work in the opposite direction of what I'm trying to achieve I know that I used to have a friend who lived on Abilia down down a couple blocks down a block down and I used to turn right there all the time and there's no trouble turning right there the issue is going to be turning left which one would actually hope no one would do but of course we know that doesn't happen um turning left is got uh you have five lanes you have two lanes going each way in the center lane and so for those of us who turn left out of Abilia um if you're impatient as some are um you can pull halfway out into this middle lane and wait till that clears and that's that's as clear visibility as you can get right there so yeah so just to be clear again hope clarify for me because I think that's can we go back to the render the diagram of the yes that stop oh now this one and if we kind of zoom in on that can you zoom okay because there's a 25 foot mark there but it's starting at the property line but for the line of sight you're really starting at the street so that's I feel like you're like you're just so close to being within that and so that's why I was feeling like it wasn't a huge ask I understand if you were it was from the property line yes you're taking a giant chunk um out of your yard but I feel like so like if we're measuring from here so this is a 25 foot marker if you're going from here 25 feet here you know if that's okay give me give me a okay I think what I think what she suggests I think what she's suggesting is that if you look at if you were to if you figure the fact that the corner if you started the actual if you were to make a square corner right okay and you see the 20 on the on the rendering you've got 25 a 25 foot marker you're really only talking about pushing everything back what would you say about two feet I mean two or three feet well which on the other hand works that works actually right or finding you know cutting some sort of angle or something because it's you know it's a triangle but that also works both ways I guess in so far as once upon a time when I started this project a year or so ago um you used to have a measurement pattern that said project divine straight and projectabilia and where those two points meet that's where you start this measurement for this 25 feet I think that's been amended so you would have to tell me where the starting point for the 25 of a triangle is I mean based on that diagram yes because this isn't this is square it's the intersection it's yet the at the intersection of the property lines okay it is where it starts and so not the street not the street yeah okay so that was I was taking that too it's like it's not the street intersection it's the intersection of the two property lines the front and the sides yeah okay but because it's already a curve you probably have more visibility there than you would think that's why my point well I mean that's why it's yeah because there's a sidewalk there's an easement in a sidewalk in a right of way you're getting closer than yeah if these were some neighborhoods where it's literally all right do we have a motion go for it I motion to approve can I get a second second subject to staff comments you know second second all in favor I okay I guess it carries thank you all right all right and we need to approve the meeting the minutes from the previous meeting or something we did that on consent yeah all right never mind okay so we yes we can go with a motion to adjourn we have nothing else on the agenda do we have a motion to adjourn a motion to adjourn all in favor hi all right