The Fargo Planning Commission met on Tuesday, October 3, 2023, at 3:00 PM in the Commission Chambers at City Hall. Chair Rocky Schneider called the meeting to order, noting the upcoming Fargo Growth Plan open houses on October 17 and 18, and the website fargogrowthplan.org. The meeting adjourned at 4:35 PM. All seven members present (Gunkelman, Schmidt, Morgan, Rosenberg, Shewey, Tasa, Schneider) voted unanimously on all items; Members Stofferahn and Holtz were absent.
The meeting to order. Um, just a quick announcement that uh Fargo Growth Plan dot org is our website for our Fargo Growth Plan update that the city is working on. And there's going to be open houses held on Tuesday and Wednesday on the seventeenth and eighteenth. There's a couple different options for you to be involved, or you can go on Fargo Growth Plan dot org. So we encourage everybody in the audience and everybody online to take advantage of that opportunity to talk about where you see the future of Fargo as we use the growth plan for almost everything we do here. So we appreciate your input. Motion and second, any discussion. Any opposed. Any discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed, same sign. Motion passes. Moving on to our public hearing items. Number one will ask Donald to the podium here. Our first item is the Meadow View second edition, which is located here. This is University Drive South and 70th Avenue. This is edge of Davies High School here. And as you see, looks better in the close-up here. There are a number of lots here that are involved in this subdivision. A little different here. They are along Meadow View Drive South. These pictures are from yesterday. Meadowview Drive South is the only street not yet constructed in this subdivision. And it is under construction here. Couple of different views. This building here is this building here. These are not that building is not in the subdivision. That faces 68th Avenue South. The properties are zoned SR4, single dwelling residential. No zone change is proposed here. But what's happening is the uh the right of way, the vacational right-of-way referred to in your staff report. Uh the right of way is getting wider. The street itself will not be any wider, but the the uh right-of-way will be four feet wider, and we'll look at a section drawing prepared by our engineering department in a moment. But when you know we get these uh somewhat narrower lots, these lots here are being replatted. Some of these, these overall get a little bit narrower. There's a chart in your staff report that indicates what the differences are. These lots do not change size on this side. But the idea is as you get the lots get narrower. You've often seen um here and in other towns where it seems like there's not a lot of room between driveways, there's you know, no place to park on the street, even though parking might be allowed, no place to stack the snow. So the idea, this is uh somewhat of an experiment um to try to widen the right-of-way. So here would be our standard 70-foot section for the roadway here. This is the proposed one, so you see the boulevards are two feet wider on either side, a 14 foot as well as a over, or instead of a 12-foot boulevard, also provides more room for trees there, and so that's what this is really doing. Like I said, that one row of lots is um many of them are getting a little bit narrower, and then the right-of-way is expanding, and then an important feature of this is as you see these dark dashed lines here. Um, these are negative access easements, and uh these are um to prevent just like negative access seasements always are to prevent access, so it's gonna limit where the driveways are gonna go. This is 12 feet on either side here, and they'll be on on both sides. The uh yeah, they're they don't show up real well, but they're right there. And this is to provide a guaranteed area where there won't be a driveway intervening in there, so you've always got a straight stretch of 24 feet at least. Uh the developers working with the city engineer's office to uh adjust the size of those. There might be a little different configuration on the final version, but that's the idea to to uh to make that work.