Ed Roberts Campus at ZAB, July 10: modification of use permit

[Robert Lauriston]

I just received a notice of a Zoning Adjustments Board hearing on a
modification of the use permit for the Ed Roberts Campus. The hearing
is scheduled for July 10 at 7:00pm at 2123 MLK (City Council
chambers).

Background:

The front, Adeline portion of the building will be in the C-SA
commercial district. The rear, parking lot / Tremont portion will be
in the R-3 district.

Consequently, one of the conditions in the use permit required that
the 5,000 square feet devoted to the administrative offices of Through
the Looking Glass (one of the tenants) be located in the commercial-
district portion of the building, since offices are prohibited in the
R-3 district.

Current hearing:

The ERC seeks to modify the permit to allow the administrative offices
to be relocated to the residential-district portion of the building.
Their argument is that a nonprofit providing community services is a
"community center," which is an allowed use in the R-3 district.

Pros:

It would be good for the ERC to be free to allocate space in its
building as it sees fit.

Cons:

My only concern is that if the ZAB accepts the ERC's definition of
"community center," that could establish a precedent that would reduce
current restrictions on institutional uses in residential districts.

Through the Looking Glass is a nonprofit organization providing
services to the community, and its staff consists of therapists,
social workers, and the like. I believe such uses are normally
classified as "Offices: Other Professionals and Government,
Institutions, Utilities," which are prohibited in residential
districts.

There are surely other theories on which the ZAB could approve this
change without broadening the definition of "community center."

[Robert Lauriston]

The staff report and attachments are online here:

http://www.cityofberkeley.info/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=23220

There's an article about this hearing in today's Berkeley Daily
Planet:

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2008-07-10/article/30526

The article says, "The campus is looking for tenants to fill seven
empty spots totaling about 24,000 square feet."

Per the staff report submitted to the ZAB, "the number of lease spaces
has increased from 12 to 15, without any change in the total leasable
space of the project," and "The applicants have requested that the
approved professional office space be available to any office tenant,
not just the specific organizations approved under the Use Permit."

The proposed findings and conditions include the finding, "Because the
total amount of office space in the building would not change, this
request does not intensity the building’s traffic generation or
parking demand." This is a dubious assumption, given that the traffic
impact and parking requirements in the 2004 Mitigated Negative
Declaration (environmental impact report) were calculated by surveying
the original nine partners, and that disability-serving organizations
tend to need more square feet per person than the average office. If
the space were rented out to whoever, depending on the nature of the
tenants' business the parking requirements and possibly other impacts
could be significantly higher than assumed in the MND.

Also, the conditions discussed in the MND's "Mitigation Measure -
Traffic 4" are based on the original concept that only partners in the
ERC would occupy the building. If the partners lease space to
commercial tenants, mitigating permit conditions such as "Providing a
central “clearing house” of meeting schedules to ensure orderly event
planning and preventing overlapping of large attendance events" might
not be practical to enforce.