The Board of Zoning Appeals met 03/21/2022 and took up a variance request for the property at 115 E. Washington St. This is the property that is directly across Washington Street from the Transit Center and is the currently empty lot by City Center where the Conway Hotel used to be and where Merge LLC is planning to build a mixed-use development project with 56 housing units.
This variance request was “to place a dumpster enclosure on the south property line. Section 23-43(f)(2) of the Zoning Ordinance requires dumpster enclosures to be five (5) feet from the side and rear property line.” The applicant noted in the questionnaire they submitted that “A variance would not be needed if the dumpster was attached to the building, but that is not practical as that would impede the existing walkway. The dumpster enclosure would ideally be very close to the alley for eas[e] of waste removal.”
This was the first Board of Zoning Appeals meeting I have watched since I started regularly watching committee meetings where the board voted to hold an item to take up again at a future meeting. This is my opinion, but I felt that a lot of that had to do with a lack of preparedness on the part of the applicant which was Bolton and Menk the civil design team for the project. When I wrote the post regarding the agenda for the meeting, I didn’t even include a screenshot of the site diagram because of the poor quality of the image that had been included in the application. The Hatch Legend and Site Layout Keynotes were all unreadable, and you were kind of left to guess what exactly was going on with the diagram. Even the dumpster enclosure itself, which was the entire focus of the application, was not necessarily clearly identified.
Rose Schroeder, a planner with Bolton and Menk, appeared remotely to represent them during the meeting, and she also did not strike me as being overly prepared for the meeting, although, again, that was just my impression.
She explained to the board that they were working within the confines of this tight infill site and needed to fit not only the dumpster enclosure but also a generator, a transformer, and some other things as well. The best placement they had found for the dumpster enclosure was on the southeast corner of the property next to the alley. They wanted it to be separate from the building and not against the building because if they pushed it against the face of the building it would interfere with the pedestrian walkway around the site. They thought this was the most appropriate placement because they could access it with trucks and not impede pedestrian traffic.
Board member Kelly Sperl started out with the most basic of questions which was what type of dumpsters were they going to use. Roll offs? 6 yarders? 2 yarders? Where they automated cans? What would be going in the enclosure?
Rose answered that they had typically been using 6-yard roll offs at projects that were similar to this.
Board member Sperl responded that that seemed odd and he didn’t know if he’d ever seen a 6-yard roll off. Rose answered that she might be saying it wrong, and admitted that she didn’t have the rest of the specs in front of her, although she did end up pulling them up after a bit.
[I don’t know if people having detailed conversations about dumpsters could ever really warrant breaking the popcorn out, but that was the moment in the meeting where I felt things started to go…not smoothly.]
A decent portion of the discussion was Chairman McCann and Board Member Sperl trying to figure out the logistics of where and how the garbage and recycling was going to be collected. They wanted the dumpster enclosure located on the south east corner of the property. The street that ran along the south of the property was a private street owned by City Center so Merge, LLC would not be allowed to drive a truck along it to pick up the garbage and recycling.
The other way to access that corner was via the quite narrow paved alley along the east property line. This was owned by Merge, but it seemed like it would be tight to drive a garbage truck down and then have it back out.
The question was what kind of dumpsters would they be using and would those dumpsters be rolled out of the enclosure for pickup by a private company or pickup by the city of Appleton? Where would they be rolled out to? It didn’t seem like there was space on Washington Street to put them and if they were supposed to be pulled out to Oneida Street it didn’t seem clear where they would go. Chairman McCann commented that the location of the dumpster enclosure seemed impractical in terms of filling the dumpsters and then getting them someplace where they could be picked up by a waste hauler.
It also was not clear as to why the dumpster enclosure needed to be unattached from the building. The diagram indicated that the dumpster enclosure and the building were separated by a walkway, but there didn’t seem to be clear reason why the dumpster enclosure could not be attached to the building (thus no longer necessitating a variance) and the walkway could be on the outside. It wasn’t clear what the purpose was to have the walkway between the building and the dumpster enclosure.
Rose was a planner, not an architect, so there were some questions she couldn’t answer, and an architect was not available at that time to answer them.
It wasn’t clear what the hardship was that necessitated the granting of a variance. As Rose herself noted, they were trying to maximize the capacity of the site, but if they could build larger, they could also build smaller.
Ultimately, the board members generally liked the idea of what Merge was trying to accomplish—to bury the dumpsters on the site and get them as far away from the public face of the building as possible, but there were practical logistical issues that came into play that they didn’t fully understand. Chairman McCann said he would find it helpful to have more understanding of the logistics and of the overall site plan so he could get an idea of why locating the dumpster enclosure in other areas was problematic. In particular he wanted to understand if the walkway was a critical and if there was a reason why it couldn’t be moved or configured differently.
Rose ended up requesting that, instead of denying the variance request, that the board hold the request so that she could return to the next meeting with some more information and some supplemental, enlarged diagrams. The board agreed to do that and voted accordingly.
[I literally watched a 35-minute discussion about the location of some dumpsters. Let it never be said that city government is boring.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=21308&GUID=426D8248-7E82-4296-B0BA-A36DE5C1ED8A
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