This transcript appears to be a meeting of the **Hastings Planning Commission**. Based on the context provided and the dialogue within the text, I have identified the speakers as **Melanie Peters** (Chair of the Planning Commission), **Justin Fortney** (City Staff/City Planner), **Mark Fraser** (The Applicant), and two commissioners whose names are phonetically transcribed in the text as "Tykan" and "Manske." [0:01] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** first up is the approval of the minutes from june 13 2022 are there any corrections or additions okay if there are none we'll consider those to be approved number three is a public hearing on hubs landing conditional use permit doc expansion 6 spiral view loop justin fortney from staff is here thank you very much i'm going to first pass out a couple things thank you [1:09] **Justin Fortney:** um thank you so the planning commission is asked to hold a public hearing tonight for conditional use permit uh this it's essentially the same thing as a special use permit but it's termed a conditional use permit in our floodplain ordinance and this similar approval was granted in 2009 by the city of hastings following some some studies that were done for this project and for some dredging and improvements to the shoreline since that time about two-thirds of these of the additional 30 slips have been installed and they were going to be putting in the the last 11 [1:55] **Justin Fortney:** and they were going to be changing the uh the layout of those slips and a change to a special use permit or conditional use permit requires that it be reviewed and reissued and so this is showing the aerial picture how the site generally looks today and these are some photographs of the area um a little clear in another aerial picture that has the well actually the paper i sent out has a proposed layout on it but they generally are in the area of this this red line these are some pictures of the of the [2:41] **Justin Fortney:** site the parking areas um kind of a gravel mixture there's not a lot of delineation there are some areas that are marked for vehicles with boat trailers you can see some of those lines on the ground [3:11] **Justin Fortney:** this another aerial photograph of the current conditions this was the 2009 layout the green were going to be the additional slips and this is what's proposed now to have them continue but closer to the shore and connect to that first dock that's along the shore rather than lengthen that double dock double slip dock that's uh out further away from the shore i believe there's concerns with just the the current and uh the forces on that dock and possibly [3:58] **Justin Fortney:** maneuvering in and around it um so the dnr has reviewed uh the proposed changes to the layout to determine if there was going to be any negative impact to the navigation of the area and if it would increase any of the flood risk in the area compared to the previous layout that was reviewed for those issues they found that it wasn't increasing those hazards because of the location um being [4:45] **Justin Fortney:** being where it is for closer to shore and in line with those other improvements and um so the dnr has all but um acknowledged that there's that they have no issues with with any of that they would be looking at i think some further details on the stockpile of the temporary judging material that would come out of where those would be to make sure there's enough water depth there staff had raised some concerns over parking issues there's been a lot of vehicles parking on that spiral view loop road [5:31] **Justin Fortney:** the applicant states that those vehicles aren't from from this site and he did approach the city on getting some no parking signs to put up in the area of their driveway because they were having issues with cars not being able to pull out of their driveway with trailers because of the the angles and the narrowing of that street effectively with the vehicles so some of their parking that they have on site is used by a couple other uses that weren't used back in 2009 when this was reviewed when this was reviewed in 2009 they were [6:17] **Justin Fortney:** going to stop having the public launch accessible to to anybody which would lower their parking need down quite a bit but since that time they've also added 12 passes for individuals that used to use that dock or that boat launch regularly and they also have some storage launch members of the marina i think they have up to 25 of those available i believe they're not all utilized right now but those would be boats that are on trailers there [7:02] **Justin Fortney:** that they would come with their vehicles and then launch them in the water and then put the then take them out and leave them on site so both of those uses take up uh you know a little bit of parking they're kind of i believe all those are probably delineated on there uh those looks like a lot of the boats on this aerial picture and when you go down there are kind of around this uh circular area the applicant states that the parking that they they have there is adequate they do the applicants said they do stack parking there when multiple people come for the same boat they would [7:48] **Justin Fortney:** group their vehicles together and park in front of each other to use up less space we did receive the a letter from somebody who was claiming that they were a concerned member of the marina that they don't believe that there's uh room for 11 people to park because and people are currently being blocked in they didn't specify if they were being blocked in by choice because they were grouping their vehicles together or if people were blocking in other people but but we do know that stacking does occur out there and whether it's on purpose or um you know with people in the same party [8:33] **Justin Fortney:** who are going to get there at the same time and it won't be an issue because they can leave together or if it's people blocking other people in obviously it sounds like there is tight parking there to do that and it partially it might be because you know it's a gravel lot so it's not delineated and marked well oftentimes that is an efficient way to park the applicant did submit a notice that i handed out to you that it was acknowledgment by the association of slip owners for this application to the dnr for their review and likely for you know it would [9:21] **Justin Fortney:** follow that it was also for this conditional use permit so the association four board members that are signatories on there uh really two of them are from the applicant party but with the other two that they are supportive of this proposal and they they are aware of it and they the association itself didn't submit anything to the city and we did publish a notice in the newspaper for this request and provided a notification within 350 feet of the request for the public hearing and we didn't receive any other comments besides the one that you received tonight [10:09] **Justin Fortney:** staff has been recommending approval for this proposal with some conditions that no more uses are allowed on the property than the 80 slips that are there and the two uses i mentioned that are related to people that would come and launch and and park there while they are in the water and then with the 25 leaving their boats behind um partially because this was uh the parking was reviewed in 2009 and approved and partially because we don't have [10:56] **Justin Fortney:** standards for parking related to marinas and boat slips and it being a more of a private site with membership rather than a site open to the public we didn't take quite as strict a stance on it as as we probably would have for another business but but again there's the conditions that if they do run out of parking spaces for their uses they have to either remove uses until the parking can be accommodated on site or they could do improvements to the parking lot to assure that vehicles can all park there so with that i can answer any questions [11:41] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** from the commission or we can move to open the public hearing okay thanks justin i think we'll go ahead and open the public hearing okay public hearing is now open um is there anybody here who wishes to speak if you do if you'd please come on up to the podium state your name and your address and then make your comments known anyone if you submitted the letters we have those can you come up we got to come up here yeah so they can hear you on the on the recording thanks jason [12:29] **Mark Fraser:** my name is mark mark fraser i'm the one who submitted the application so justin had informed us that we had to update this conditional use permit because our 2009 permit was getting old and he thought it would be a good idea to run it by the planning commission and the city council so sorry we had to bring you out here on this nice night i wanted to talk a little bit about a few things that justin had mentioned to maybe help you out understand where we're at so we had run through our eaw back in 2009 2010 we had planned on putting those slips and then but the bridge project was kicking off at that point in time and we were asked by the department of natural resources to hold off on that until the bridge [13:15] **Mark Fraser:** project because they at that point time they didn't have any ideas on where what side of the bridge it was going or where it was going so we held off on that during that eaw we had asked if we could dredge it would be this portion of the river right here for future expansion or for maybe a better way to take boats in and out rather than our ramps you know and so that was part of the molly show dean the dnr hydrologist at the time told us to put that in the eaw as well so we put that in the dredging portion of it so back then as soon as the bridge project was done we were able to [14:01] **Mark Fraser:** put in 19 out of the 30 slips and so um we got those in and then we hit low water and i'm not sure this area to the right of the sandbar crept all the way down and so we had to dredge that material out we either had a dredge material out or we had to uh we the our boats weren't getting out so we took the money that we were going to spend on the new slips and we purchased a dredge to get that material taken care of so we were able to finish that dredge project um last fall and then so we started on the lovin slips project and then so we've been working with dan scolland from the dnr and daryl i can't pronounce his last name sorry [14:48] **Mark Fraser:** from the army corps of engineers and so what we had decided what dan and daryl wanted us to do they tentatively daryl okayed the project but he has to run it through his internal people a little bit more and then dan okayed the project and what we're going to do is this area right up here in this corner is where they want the dredge material to be placed and we can build in a rock and they want us to build in a rock area a berm so that the water when the dredge material gets pumped into this area the water seeps through the rock and then we have a silt fence out and that alleviates the material from leaching back into the [15:36] **Mark Fraser:** into the water so that's the area you had mentioned about the material and that's what was okay with the dnr permit and hopefully with the army corps of engineers the other thing is we don't allow after the bridge project and actually during the bridge project we lost a huge amount of our customers with that project you wouldn't think that we would be affected because they always had entrances and exits in and out of that area mndot was pretty good at that but for some reason we did lose a huge percentage and it took us it took us years to get back to that um get back to normal as a matter of fact i you know we probably last year we started getting back to normal in [16:22] **Mark Fraser:** terms of rates so in doing that we stopped we changed our business model and no longer allowed public launching so we closed our launch to the public um we had always had store and launch but we never had season passes i think maybe we did have the punch cards back then and that's where you had mentioned that punch card um but that kind of fizzled out but we always had store launch i don't know if you guys know what this looked like prior to the bridge but um this section of land and this section land is hubs landing or its hubs yacht club and marinas we were actually getting taxed on this portion of the land where the bridge was [17:07] **Mark Fraser:** until we brought it to their attention but this was all woods right in there with the only access being off that road and um so we actually had all this area down here to park boats and stuff so we stored boats there but after a while um we started when we put those 19 slips in we started limiting the amount of boats coming down to the marina and then when this road came mndot actually i think it's called a low profile curb they installed the low poke profile curb so that the marina had access on and off to help the boats with trailers [17:53] **Mark Fraser:** and so we i had actually put a sign up on telephone pole which was used to have you know signs you know five dollars for extra cars or no slow down no wake you know just to keep people to go through there slower but we had put aside no parking to the corner to keep people from parking their boats and trailers on the road or just parking their trailers on the road because it does make it hard to get and back in so up there by the trailer house is for our season passes and uh mark hawes is here he's the general manager of the marina and he can talk more about the parking as it is today but so that area there is four season passes [18:40] **Mark Fraser:** and we sell about 11 maybe 12 but i think we're down this year we don't have as many and we're down to like 19 or 20 dry store but him and i have walked this area many times about future parking and so the future parking that we're looking at the slips are going to come off here but this whole area on this side could be access for future parking and we could eliminate the dry store there without really having a detrimental effect on the that revenue stream for store and launch so that areas and then we don't park anything over here in this area so that is another underutilized area that we could utilize for [19:27] **Mark Fraser:** a revenue stream so but the the key to that message is we can if parking ever becomes an issue on the road we don't like people parking on the road it's not it's not our what we do we have enough parking inside where people can park their cars without going out on the road but if it ever did get to that issue and it was a bother to the city or there was an issue they would just have to tell us and we'd start limiting those streams of revenue streams and that's kind of what he was mentioning about changing our business model from the old days to the new days we just have to change the business model to more slips [20:13] **Mark Fraser:** and less dry store and um store and launch the other thing in that letter today that he had sent out this afternoon i'm not really sure if it was a one of our members that sent it because one our members they they hadn't broadcast out this meeting to our membership so hardly any of our members even knew about that the meaning which is unfortunate because i wish it would have came the other thing too is they say that we stack cars and that's true we do stack cars but as justin mentioned we stack cars for each boat so there's not some car coming in and just randomly parking behind another car that [20:59] **Mark Fraser:** just doesn't happen and if it doesn't does happen we find out oops sorry mark finds out about it right away and we rectify that session he can talk more about that if you like so we don't get a lot of stack parking where people are blocking people in that just doesn't happen it hasn't happened in you know in the 20 years that we've been down there so um but i just wanted to bring that out and then i'm here for any questions that you have for me commissioners any questions [21:45] **Commissioner Tykan:** Do you know how many parking spots you have on site? [21:49] **Mark Fraser:** um you know like he mentions it's kind of like a gravel parking lot and we do have designated spots in certain areas um and what did i i don't recall what i'd sent you it was over 80 80 some parking spots currently like i said we do have room for i can i can't see what you're pointing at so on one area we can put okay yeah so this area right over here we can probably put in um single cars probably about five to seven cars in that area alone this area over on the south side if we [22:31] **Mark Fraser:** right now we could probably put in four cars and then if we remove these or move these dry store to a different area that's underutilized we'd probably have 14 spots for cars and then these spots here are all double car parking or if maybe even more you could probably put some of them you could put three cars behind each other and then but all of those you could put two cars behind each other so i and i'm not familiar with all these terms you're throwing out so dry storage parking lot okay what does all that mean so the this area right around the circle here is dry store so that's where people bring their boats down and they park [23:17] **Mark Fraser:** them there through the year so from april 1st to october 31st they park their boats there and then they can use the ramp anytime that they want and then the up by the house area between the house and the road is our storm launch or our season passes in the same time frame they can come down and use the launch any time but they take their boats home with them on weekends they'll keep their boats there you know friday saturday nights but when they go home the boat goes with them and so that's our season passes and like right now we're we're under utilized on our season passes and then we're underutilized on our store launch [24:02] **Mark Fraser:** the other thing too about that is you know the season passes were primarily for fishermen um that used to come down there all the time and so they're only there you know during the week in the mornings or on the weekends in the morning and then they're gone so the 12 people um who if we had 12 folks they're not there at the same time right mark can speak to this too but um you know we probably have five launches per day on saturday and sunday and that's it so about five cars there so we can start utilizing that space you know for you to start eliminating the season passes and utilizing moving the dry store over there to utilize this whole front area [24:51] **Mark Fraser:** okay thank you thank you mr church all right thanks mr taken commissioners any other questions [24:54] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** um i'm trying to get a sense of the when this was approved um you know up to the 80 slips back in was it 2009 um you know then there were approximately 84 parking spots but if is that that was my understanding so then since then and help me unders i want to make sure i'm calculating this correctly so there's the potential now of adding these 11 which would bring it up to the 80 slips total plus potentially 25 of the dry storage [25:37] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** plus the 12 potential season passes now there's 117 items being used for you know things spots where people might be using vehicles for a parking lot that at the time was approved for that amount of 80 slips so i my struggle with this then i'm seeing where you might be considering adding parking but then that also converts some of what it looks like green space to a different kind of surface right because it looks like it's grass and trees and things like that but now that would be a hard surface would it be [26:24] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** gravel or what um it i mean mark knows more about it but from my uh visualization of it in pictures it's kind of all gravelly with some uh just ground cover you know trying to grow through some of this kind of hard pack gravel stuff that's i wouldn't call in any of it um okay even so it seems like there's parking right now for available for about the use of 80 but now it's going to increase or it's not increased but it seems like there's up to 117 with the 80 the 25 and the and the 11 or 12. yeah so what mr fraser mentioned uh at the beginning [27:10] **Justin Fortney:** when he was talking was that the the dry storage in launch is something that they've always done for a long time i wasn't aware reading through the 2009 staff report that that was mentioned but that's not a that evidently is not a new uh use and i guess thinking back i've always seen boats parked there throughout the the season so is it am i correct yeah and then um i'm not sure that i thought we would have had back in the 2009 2010 permit from the city there might have been more spaces and there were under utilized spaces this uh the space that's up on the north [27:57] **Mark Fraser:** and was really under underutilized where there would be only like four cars parked there that would be this end up here and then we kind of over the years we've redesigned it because realistically we are in the business of space right whether it's space on the water space on land we rent space um and so we tried to work the best we could but in the same token keeping it small and kind of homey there's we could realistically go through it and read get an engineer and come through and redesign the whole parking lot but we never did that because i know everything just seemed to work [28:42] **Mark Fraser:** for us and mark like i said mark could talk too about the parking he deals with that day in and day out about the parking and we've it it's always worked for us have you ever needed to have people park out on the street no we have never that since the bridge project we don't we don't allow people to park on the street with their boat and trailers that's just not what we do i'd like to also mention you know it's not an exact science determining parking requirements we sure don't ever require parking to satisfy the extreme situation we don't require like commercials establishments to have enough parking for their uh fire code [29:29] **Justin Fortney:** capacity or for black friday shopping um we just try to determine what what the best number is to handle i i don't even know eighty percent of the the the parking needs are more um and again like i said we don't have any standards for this use um you know i i don't like you see on this aerial picture i don't know this is in the spring i'm not sure what the date was or the time but you know how many boats are are taken out maybe the third yeah it seems like a lot of the boats are not in here a lot of them are on the hard here too for over winter because you can see the boat on this area right by the launch that we don't [30:15] **Mark Fraser:** store boats there so that would be where a boat is stored during the winter time and this particular project here that we're talking about today really won't start until next year so if we have to modify our parking needs that means next year we just won't allow that many more dry dock or that many more season passives so um so you'll kind of swap correct yep yeah so that wasn't sure i know that i know that like for boat launches it's hard to get spots so i'm assuming that whatever capacity you have will be used but you're saying like you'll swap out if you if you're adding those slips then you won't have the other piece okay so it's not really going to add vehicles then it'll be similar to now you're just [31:01] **Mark Fraser:** swapping how yeah they're used okay and i think we'd be able to put in more cars because you know where we do the dry store when people come and launch their boats they keep their trailer connected and park it in the back lot so that's actually like two cars you know maybe two and a half if that's a long boat of parking there for cars so i think i think it'll work out well actually and um so that we're kind of excited for that okay thanks mr peters fishers any other questions thanks do we have anybody else who would like to speak on this subject [31:49] **Justin Fortney:** i'm not exactly sure okay all right if you're on zoom feel free to submit your comments via email at a later time all right we'll get those okay all right commissioners all right um do we have any nobody else wishes to speak we'll go ahead and close the public hearing public hearing is now closed commissioner is open for discussion comments questions [32:08] **Commissioner Tykan:** i guess i'll start up i uh this this one's really hard for me and uh i think it's really bad that we don't have standards if this was a jimmy john's or a target or somebody coming into the city there'd be green space standards there'd be parking standards there'd be all kinds of standards we have an open lot next to a river that 80 some people can park in and drain oil in the parking lot and the flood comes by and all that washes downstream it's sad that we don't have something to protect itself it's all hard hard space by the looks of it so there's no no way for water to infiltrate it and again i know we're on the river but we should be taking care of the river more than we've taken care of businesses so it's it's a struggle for me that we have all these standards for all these businesses that come in here and we don't have a standard for this and this isn't the only marina in town so it's kind of surprising that we haven't run into this before and i get what you're saying that we don't make walmart build to black friday standards but they do have a standard and it's [33:21] **Commissioner Tykan:** consistent across everybody uh 84 spots and 117 and potential uses you know i i boat not on a river but locally and you know there's usually two or three cars when we go out because friends and family come out with me so i'm struggling with this a lot because there's no standard so how do we look at it is the city looked at any other cities that have standards around marina parking um no i mean i haven't and it wasn't anything that was studied for the 2009 approval yeah i get that and [34:06] **Justin Fortney:** we can fix the things we've done in the past we do it all the time so i struggle with this i'd like to hear what other people think all right commissioner tekken thank you commissioner manske [34:11] **Commissioner Manske:** so when when we established standards i always think of what would we do if we had a fire what would we do if we needed emergency services out there such as ambulance would we be able to access the parts of the marina that need to be accessed with those services i mean without seeing a clear layout of how things are laid out and how things people park out there what happens if we have such things as community those services needed i mean we never think about it until you try and get a fire truck and there are an ambulance in there and you can't so that's the only question i would have is is there's no defined parking and therefore and no defined how many cars can be there how do we you get around and we need to decide that has this been reviewed by somebody at the the fire marshal or this the fire department or so this is not a site plan if this was a new use and they were coming for approval it would be a full site plan and they would be required to have uh improved parking lot and they would be required to have holding ponds you know in all that we still wouldn't have an exact number to [35:37] **Justin Fortney:** rely on for the number of parking spots you know we could try to come up with something and maybe work with them and see if they'd be willing to to put in you know what the we find the averages of places that maybe have standards first for this type of use i don't know if there are any um and just try to try to work something out but that's the time when when all that is is reviewed and it might have might have happened when this started i imagine this probably started you know before that was common practice but with uh conditional use permit for adding 11 slips and nothing on the the site is being modified we don't have the ability to do a site plan and [36:24] **Justin Fortney:** impose any of those new improvements um that are in the requirements now but obviously weren't when it was originally designed right so this is nothing new it's not new we're just shifting an originally approved concept over to a different part of it with the blessing of the dnr and all the parties involved it's not actually a site plan where we can actually change anything about the original plan we're just asking to review moving 11 slips which we're going to be built anyway from over here down to right along the shoreline with the the dredge site and the where they call that material i am not an engineer or anything close [37:10] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** to it and i don't go boating so i don't know dredge material okay oh okay all right where the dredge material is going to go and then the and then the slips are gonna go so these 11 slips were originally approved correct at some earlier on they just were approved for a different location and now the dnr said well better idea would be to put them here instead less impact as originally than originally planned because of all the changes over the like over the years technically as approved in 2009 um well the whole general concept was approved with the eaw in 2008 2009 the conditional us permit was uh issued and then in 2010 it was reaffirmed because i [37:56] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** think it had expired because they hadn't done anything at that point so they had it reaffirmed again and then had put in the majority of them well believe it or not over the weekend i did drive after work the spiral loop both saturday and sunday and there's no issues you didn't you wouldn't even know that there were people there unless you went down into the parking lot and looked really hard for the trailers and so forth so i didn't see any issues with the parking on the on the road at all so um without just the benefit of knowing who wrote this i really can't support that notion because i don't have anything to go by other than my own eyes and i've never seen any issues with any vehicles parking on the road at all [38:42] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** on either side of 61. so unfortunately since it's anonymous there's nothing i can i can't do anything with that but commissioners any other what's your romance [39:03] **Commissioner Manske:** justin so this is essentially amending the old cop right um yeah it's more like yeah because if they did nothing they wouldn't have to do anything right now that conditional use permit does not expire does not right the original conditional use permit is not expired because they did do improvements that were approved with it so that conditional use permit will run up the land and won't ever expire um the reason why we're here reviewing this is because they are proposing to put them in a different location than was originally proposed okay so yeah i i kind of follow along the same idea here if we narrow this down to we're just looking at where those have been moved what regardless of whatever the site plan was approved at whatever point in time um that's a little bit out of our jurisdiction at this point in time um yeah would things be a little bit nicer in a different way or um you know i do bring up the same thoughts about the stormwater runoff for many vehicles or something like that but that is you know that can be an issue handled by mpca if [40:13] **Commissioner Manske:** it needs to be um um so i i overall i'm i have no problem with it being moved over to the other side here as long as it's met with conditions of the um the engineers and md and dnr and uh mndot it seems to be applicable uh in the same way it was in 2009 so that's all i had thanks if uh we're all good i can make a motion to approve um let me get up to that uh i'll make a motion to approve the conditional use permit 2022-45 the marina at six spiral uh view [41:00] **Commissioner Manske:** loop with the uh attached uh conditions yes all right we have a motion to approve by commissioner romans strep second commissioner further discussion okay do i have a second if not i'll go ahead and second it all right second by me all right any further discussion new discussion if not all in favor say aye aye aye aye opposed name one day two days [41:40] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** yeah so we don't have enough to uh for an approve for that to pass so it'll go to the next city council meeting with with that with that without a recommendation for approval okay all right all right there you go thank you thank you mr sure yes when's that going to go to the city council oh yeah what date is that um the fourth or the fifth yeah thank you thank you all right we are now on to other business justin [42:24] **Justin Fortney:** um i guess the only business i have would be the uh approvals that city council made at their last meeting following a planning commission meeting they approved the variants for the additional accessory structure on first street east first street and approval of the site plan for kfc on vermillion street uh that was a split vote i don't recall how many dissents there were but it passed question did they say when they're going to break ground on the kfc i don't recall if i ever heard from i'm just curious i'm very curious guys so all right i don't think they said i watched it they didn't have any kind of a timeline yeah i don't in fact i don't know that [43:13] **Melanie Peters (Chair):** i've ever heard it from them in discussions but i'd probably start this year still okay it's nice to see the dairy store move over yeah any other business justin or no i'm sure is any other business nope all right if not i'll turn your motion to adjourn all right commissioner tykan second commissioner a second all right all in favor say all right we are adjourned