At its work session Tuesday night, East Lansing City Council voted 3-2 to approve modifications to a special use permit which would allow for the construction of a previously unapproved fifth floor at St. Anne Lofts.
A series of amendments to the initial agenda item approved the fifth floor with several additional conditions, including a condition which would require weekly reports addressing safety deficiencies to be submitted to council. The amendments also included a requirement that city officials would be on hand for each council meeting until a certificate of occupancy is ready to be issued for the project.
Council debated the item for more than two hours, discussing safety and procedural concerns and financial ramifications before coming to a decision. Councilmembers Vic Loomis and Don Power cast the dissenting votes.
“As unpleasant as it might be in our guts to say this project needs to move forward, we have an obligation to look at those standards and make a decision based on them and not on based extrinsic factors,” Mayor Pro Tem Nathan Triplett said.
Another pair of conditions to the special use permit limited occupancy for one and two bedroom apartments in the building to families or no more than two unrelated residents, and eliminated roof access from the building’s north side on the fifth floor.
Citations were issued to the project’s builder and owner for knowingly violating the the building permit. City Attorney Tom Yeadon said the offense carries with it a maximum fine of $1,000.
However, Power expressed distaste for the fee.
“I think a very clear symbol has to be given that if you build in this city, we have standards and procedures and if you do not follow them, there are consequences,” he said. “And a $1,000 is not a consequence.”
A projection from Community Development and Planning Director Tim Dempsey indicated the additional floor would increase the project’s value by about $200,000 to $250,000, and add an additional $112,500 in taxable value. The additional value could decrease the reimbursement timeline of the taxable increment financing, or TIF, from 30 years to 27 years.
“Our TIF is dealing with taxpayer dollars, and we need to know what ramifications this has on the TIF,” Loomis said.
In addition to Loomis’ questions about financial ramifications, Power raised concerns about two outstanding safety items from an original list of eight items needing attention that came from the initial field report from JDH Structural Engineering. However, Dempsey said the majority of safety concerns had been addressed and he was confident the outstanding items would be taken care of as well.
“We have notes related to the appendices that address about 90 percent of those discrepancies and documentation issues,” he said. “For the open ended items, we continue to work with the developer to get those done.”
Dempsey would not put a definitive timeframe on when the issues will be adequately addressed, but said he was confident it would not take long.
“It was a pretty rapid turnaround and our expectation is to wrap this up pretty quickly,” he said.
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