For the week of March 20 - 26, 2002

Sage Road duplex draws ire of neighbors

Warm Springs area prepares for construction season

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 "If the city wants smaller buildings, it has to amend the law."

- Greg Strong, Ketchum P&Z commissioner

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By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

Another large building proposal has drawn the ire of Ketchum citizens, this time in a hillside residential neighborhood in Warm Springs canyon.

Residents who live along Sage Road in Warm Springs are appealing the Ketchum Planning and Zoning Commission’s approval of a large, hillside duplex. Architect’s rendering

Residents who live along Sage Road in Warm Springs are appealing the Ketchum Planning and Zoning Commission’s approval of a large, hillside duplex. The Ketchum City Council will consider the matter sometime this spring.

The commission voted 3 to 2 Feb. 25 to approve the building, proposed by Douglas and Rebecca Delmonte. Commissioners Rod Sievers and Peter Gray voted against the project, stating that the building is too big and intrusive to be built in the city’s mountain overlay zone.

While he said he agreed that the building appears out of harmony with its surroundings, P&Z Chairman Peter Ripsom cast the tie-breaking, affirmative vote, saying the city must adhere to its own laws.

"If the city wants smaller buildings, it has to amend the law," Commissioner Greg Strong agreed.

Ketchum Attorney Doug Werth is representing 13 neighbors on the matter.

"This was a close decision before the planning and zoning commission," he said. "We agree with the two dissenting commission members, who concluded this duplex is too grandiose and not compatible in height and bulk with the surrounding neighborhood.

"This appeal affords the city council an important opportunity to provide some guidance with this and future development within avalanche and hillside zones."

Ketchum Attorney Brian Barsotti is also involved in the appeal, representing Paul and Carol Fremont-Smith. He said he believes approval of the project is in violation of the city’s hillside ordinance.

"The excavation actually takes the hill down," he said. "It’s not just building on the hillside."

Provisions in the city’s mountain overlay regulations require that construction be sensitive to the natural features of the city’s hillsides.

The proposed duplex would be 9,000 square feet and contain four floors. It’s height, measured by Ketchum’s building height definition, would be 31 feet. But from its lowest point to its highest, it would be almost 45 feet tall.

Ketchum’s building height definition, amended just last fall in response to massive hillside home facades, allows buildings to step up a hillside infinitely as long as its height is not greater than 35 feet from the horizontal plane created by the hillside.

That’s an issue the P&Z has already agreed to tackle separately from the appeal.

"The mountain overlay is one of the most sensitive zones in the city," Sievers said. "These things can stair step up a hillside ad infinitum."

The P&Z is looking at ways to limit the potential for infinite stair steps up the city’s hillsides. A proposal should be before the commission March 25 at a meeting that begins at 5:30 p.m.

In her initial review of the project, Ketchum Senior Planner Tory Canfield said her concerns were: "impact to the hillside, the build of the building, the extent of the cut and the avalanche issues. The building site is steeper than most of the building sites along Sage Road, and appears to be a deposition area from previous (historical) slides."

Comments and letters from the building’s neighbors are similar to Canfield’s list of red flags.

"We are terribly concerned about the projected building," wrote Carol Fremont-Smith, a Sage Road resident. "Last winter, we watched in horror the fiasco of the ‘great pit’ on (a nearby hillside construction site) and the huge ‘pile’ (that resulted on another lot). The neighborhood has sworn that that sort of thing will not happen again."

Bruce Armstrong, another Sage Road resident, agreed.

"I feel very strongly that the neighborhood is entitled to quiet enjoyment of their homes and should not again be threatened with construction mess, traffic blockage, physical endangerment or any of the other attendant problems such a project would create," he wrote.

Of the 25 hillside lots on the north side of Sage Road, 13 have not been developed, and one is under construction. The Ketchum P&Z approved three more duplex or single-family projects this winter.

And the number of individual projects concerns Sage Road resident Catherine Fisher. Three construction projects means three times the employees, three times the trucks, three times the excavation and three times the hassle in the small neighborhood, she told the P&Z March 11.

However, following the "fiasco" caused by last year’s hillside construction in the Sage Road neighborhood, Ketchum passed a construction mitigation resolution, which requires builders to specify the locations and extent of excavation, parking, material storage and temporary restrooms, job shacks and Dumpsters.

Ketchum Senior Planner Harold Moniz said the resulting construction mitigation plans can be coordinated along Sage Road to help reduce the impact to the area’s residents.

"I think it’s manageable," he said.

 

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