Does PnZ Have Enough Evidence to Recommend Approval of the Specific Use Permit for Lakeway?
The date of the public hearing for the ICW special use permit renewal is rapidly approaching. It will occur on Tuesday January 30th at 7:00 PM at the Town Hall. One might think that all of the paperwork to properly address the parking spot famine that has stricken the area is organized, double-checked, and devoid of obvious flaws. Then again, one might be wrong. Our public records request for the documents that will be presented at this hearing was approved this time so let’s explore what our PnZ committee will be working with.
This is a hand drawn schematic of the ICW suites from the public records request:
So we are looking at suites 109,110, and 111 from 3990 Lakeway Drive. First problem is that 33 parking spaces are shown in the drawing. Let’s take a look at what Google Maps says:
Google shows only 30 spots. Now, the next schematic shows that these three suites occupy 4,050 sqft.
That seems to line up with rough calculations on the building size in Google Maps. So where does this line up with parking code? Well, lets take a look at our old friend, ordinance 14-1 (I would recommend just adding a bookmark in your browser for this particular ordinance at this point).
So, what is the purpose of a parking ordinance and why is it separated based on business type? Well, the goal of the ordinance is to make sure that businesses have enough parking spaces to handle the estimated traffic that they will see throughout the day. This way people do not have to resort to parking on the street. Utilizing that same line of thinking, different business types have different occupancy loads. You can see that for an office district there is one parking space per 300 sq. ft after the initial overhead amount. So, if these suites were being used for sparsely populated offices, they would need 15 spots rounded up (3+11.8, assuming the 500’ line in the code means square feet). This would put the business well within the confines of the code.
However, places of worship tend to be more densely packed and therefore require more parking. As a result, we would use the “One parking space for each three seats in the main auditorium” rule. Depending on the house of worship, a seat could be defined as a chair, prayer rug areas, or a section of a pew. For the ICW, a prayer rug area would presumably be used, which has the following rough dimensions:
2.5 ft × 4 ft (0.76 m × 1.22 m) to 4 ft × 6 ft (1.2 m × 1.8 m)
So that works out to the following areas:
This means each seat can occupy an area between 10 and 24 sq. ft inclusively. Now, lets get some rough estimates about how many can fit in the building. With a total occupied area of 4,050 sq. ft, this means that we could fit between 168 to 405 seats in the suites if we filled it end to end:
That’s a big range, so how can we narrow it down? Well, looking at the ICW pictures taken around April of 2023 from Google (can’t post them here because of potential copyright issues), it appears that two large prayer rugs are used that have many designated individual prayer areas. Calculating from the photos found online, it looks like there are approximately 208 seats which fits nicely in our estimated range.
Which results in a parking requirement of 70 parking spots rounded up:
That’s a significant amount! There are 30 parking spots available in the lot, but the ICW only occupies roughly 75% of the building. So, that results in only 23 available parking spots rounded up for ICW use.
Therefore the ICW is 47 spots short of being in compliance:
Given this, the planning and zoning commission has no legal case for recommending the special use permit be approved, as well defined requirements are not being met.
If you would like to comment during the special use permit public hearing for the planning and zoning commission, please come to the town hall at 7pm on Jan 30th and make your concerns about parking ordinance compliance / traffic / safety known. Also, don’t forget to run for office. The last day to file is Friday, February 16th before 5:00PM.
Image generated by Bing Image Creator