The Coeur d'Alene City Council held a de novo public hearing on September 1, 2026, to consider an appeal of the Planning and Zoning Commission's unanimous approval of the Core Tair 2 preliminary plat. The proposed subdivision includes 320 residential lots (284 single-family and 36 multifamily) on approximately 202 acres, along with a public park, a school site, and associated tracts. The appeal was filed by Madeline Knutson, representing the Indian Meadows neighborhood. After hearing staff reports, applicant testimony, appellant arguments, and extensive public comment, the Council voted 5-1 to approve the subdivision with 32 conditions.
S226, which is the Core TER 2 subdivision. The staff report is by Sean Holm, our senior planner. Sean. Thank you, Mayor Guggen. Did a great job describing how things would go this evening. Before we get started, I wanted to define a little bit more of what a deno de novo hearing is because staff was a little bit confused on it too for a little while until we dove into the code and read the difference between your typical appeal and a de novo hearing. And so up on the screen, I do have the city's code, and I'm going to read this real quick as everybody digests what's up there. So the meaning of a de novo hearing for a subdivision in Court Elaine is that a de novo hearing refers to a new fresh review of a subdivision or preliminary plat proposal in the city starting from the beginning without relying on prior decisions or findings from the planning commission. So when does this happen? A de novo hearing is triggered when an affected person files a written appeal within 15 days of the commission's decision, which has happened. The appeal must be accompanied by the city council established fee and planning director notifies the city clerk to set a public hearing, which is why we're here tonight. The purpose of a de novo hearing is the city council is required to re-evaluate the subdivision proposal independently of the commission's prior decision to make a final determination on whether to approve, conditionally approve, deny, or to defer the request for specific information needed for a decision. The key points of this hearing is that it is public. Thank you for that time. So as the mayor has said, we do have an appeal hearing. This is a subdivision, S226AA. The owner is LREV 33 through LREV 39. Those are LLCs. An appeal of that decision was timely filed pursuant to municipal code. And then the appellant was Madeline Knutson, who was here tonight. So the decision point tonight is that council must discern determine whether the proposed preliminary plat meets the applique applicable subdivision design standards and improvement standards and make the required findings to approve, approve with conditions, deny, deny without prejudice or defer action on the request until the next scheduled hearing in order to review additional information that it deems necessarily necessary in order to render a final decision. Getting into the the meat of our meeting tonight. This is a description or an actual depiction of what the request is. So core TARI in its entirety is outlined here in the black. Core Tair 2 right here is in white. That is the subject for this evening's hearing. And then the adjacencies of roads, Pull Line Avenue and Hanley on the north, uh court and uh Hutter Road to the west, I-90 to the south. And city limits is denoted in green. So this is a request for 320 residential lots with 21 tracks. Um side of that is also some R 17, which uh it represents approximately 213 multifamily dwellings in the future, a public park, a public school site, and that is across seven phased phased additions within the 202-acre request. So a little bit of background information here. So there was first an annexation. That request came before the city and was approved on March 21 of 2023. It represented approximately 438 acres and was annexed from Cootney County. Following the annexation, actually concurrent with the annexation was a development agreement that was recorded that allowed up to 2800 ERUs, commercial spaces, parks, transversing trails, sites for two public schools, and that represents over a 20 to 30 year build out period. Following that, there was a four lot short plat request, full circle tracks that was approved on December 6th of 2023. And that created four lights uh four sites and parcels, uh, one of which contains the city's water tower, another for a future school site, a commercially zoned parcel that was sold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, and then a remainder parcel. Following that came three amendments to Exhibit E. The first of which see here was heard by council on April 15th of 2025. It adjusted the wastewater utility timeline and relocated a well site. It also was part of a zone change request, which was ultimately denied. The second amendment was a change to the exhibit E showed that there was cluster triplex on the east side, northeast side that was changed to active adults senior living and multifamily. That was supposed to come forward with the church's request. The church did hold off for a couple of months. It was heard on December 2nd of 2025. This is amendment three, in which urban townhomes were changed to religious assembly to allow for the church. And last but not least, on December 9th of 2025, Planning and Zoning Commission reviewed and unanimously approved a three-part request. One was a PUD, which was PUD 125 for a planned unit development, a subdivision that went along with that, as well as a landscaping plan that was on the northern part of the project, and the landscaping plan was for a parking lot in excess of 300 stalls. So that is the background, and then obviously we have the subdivision that was appealed, which is why we're here tonight. So this is the application summary.