I attended a quasi-public meeting Tuesday night regarding the proposed Main Street Commons project that is slated to go in where the old Walgreen’s is at the corner of Main and Bourland.

The meeting was held at the PeoriaNEXT building (which incidentally has doors that face Main Street, but they’re all locked; all pedestrians have to walk around the back of the building — by the parking lot — to enter the building, which is symbolic of the lip-service Peoria gives to pedestrians). Pat Landes and Kimberly Smith from the Planning and Growth Department were there, along with Thomas Harrington and Shawn Luesse representing the developers, and second district council person Barbara Van Auken theoretically representing the district, although she appeared to be only representing the University East neighborhood Tuesday night.

The proposed project is due to go before the Zoning Commission on Thursday at 3:00. Here’s the information that has been submitted.

There’s a lot to like about the project. It hides most of the parking in a ground-floor garage under the building. It includes retail shops on Main and Bourland. They’ve pledged to adhere to the approved building materials outlined in the code, although they apparently haven’t decided which materials they will be using.

But there are ten variances they are requesting from the Zoning Commission, and ultimately, the City Council. Many of them are minor. A few of them are troublesome:

• Fulfilling open space requirement by demolishing a home on the corner of Bourland and Russell and leaving it as a vacant lot (albeit landscaped). (This actually involves a couple variance requests.) Instead, they should simply reduce the size of the building. This would also remove the need for another variance to approve a longer building than allowed by code. It would preserve a single-family home on the corner, thus providing a better transition to the neighborhood and removing the need for a street wall.
• Speaking of street walls, another variance requests approval for a street fence instead of a street wall. While this seems relatively innocuous, it continues a precedent trending toward removal of the street wall requirement completely. That’s not a good thing. Street walls serve several functions, one of which is to help prevent exactly what’s going on here — leaving an entire corner vacant.
• The code requires that “no window may face or direct views toward a common lot line.” The developers want this waived “to allow living room windows on the west elevation of the south building, for proposed units on the second through fifth floor, (overlooking the Jimmy John’s parking lot) to be located 7′-4″ behind the common lot line.” The concern here is that, eventually, we hope that the Jimmy Johns property will be redeveloped. It currently has a one-story building with a parking lot in front (suburban siting), so overlooking the parking lot is not a problem. But what happens when that lot is redeveloped? Will the Main Street Commons development negatively impact efforts to redevelop the Jimmy Johns property? Keep in mind that the code will require that any redevelopment of Jimmy Johns’ property be a multi-story building sited next to the street and abut the Main Street Commons property. Will this cause problems from a fire-fighting standpoint? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to the question of its impact on future development because it was disallowed by Councilperson Van Auken at the meeting; the question was “theoretical” and besides, I’m not an immediate neighbor to the project. This kind of myopic thinking (ignoring both the regional impact of projects as well as the future implications of developments) is most unfortunate from a sitting council person, but not particularly surprising.

On a positive note, it’s great to see mixed-use development being proposed for Main Street. Having residents will provide more natural surveillance of the surrounding streets, and will provide a larger market for the retail shops that will go in on the ground floor. Overall, this is the kind of development we want to see. My only caution would be to consider the unintended consequences of variances to the code; as Councilman Sandberg pointed out at the meeting, the developers already know they will get 100% occupancy, so they’re just trying to maximize profits at this point. There’s no reason they can’t meet the requirements of the code, especially on the points above. The Zoning Commission and City Council should seriously consider enforcing the code at these points for the long-term good of the city.

UPDATE: It passed the Zoning Commission with next to no deliberation. Marj Klise was the only “no” vote. One of the commissioners said that provisions in the Land Development Code were “open to interpretation” — which is to say, meaningless. That was enlightening. Another commissioner said he was all for it because of all the revenue it’s going to bring to the city at a time when the city is facing a $10 million deficit. Too bad he evidently wasn’t aware that this project has been added to the Enterprise Zone and is getting its sales and property taxes abated… and that the City is asking the state to extend the Enterprise Zone past the 2013 expiration date. This project isn’t actually going to bring any revenue into the City, but it’s going to make a whole lot of money for the developers!