Anchorage planners ask commission to triple setback threshold director can approve alone

Anchorage property owners who build a few inches into a required setback could skip a public hearing entirely under a code change the Planning and Zoning Commission takes up Monday.

The Planning Department wants to triple what the planning director can approve on his own — from encroachments of 5 percent into a setback to 15 percent. Below that line, the director decides alone. Above it, the request becomes a variance and goes to the Zoning Board of Examiners and Appeals, which holds a noticed public hearing and can take three to four months to resolve.

Staff reviewed every variance application of the past decade to pick the number. Ten of those cases could have been handled administratively at a 15 percent threshold; a 10 percent line, which the department originally proposed, would have caught only three. Going to 20 percent added little, because recent setback changes in the city's one-acre residential zone had already resolved several of those cases.

The department's argument is time and money — for property owners waiting months on a few inches, and for the municipality processing the paperwork.

The trade-off is fewer cases reaching a public hearing. The record identifies no one objecting to that, and no opposing account appears in the file.

The one public comment came from a zoning board member writing as a private citizen. In a June memo, Jason Norris asked the department to step back and look at the underlying rules instead. "The root of this request is that it does not appear that our current dimensional standards are serving Anchorage well," he wrote.

The amendment would also rewrite the criteria for granting variances, recognizing circumstances like unusual lot shapes and surveying or construction errors, and clarifying language on disability access. Five other criteria stay as they are, and applicants would still have to meet all eight.

The zoning board has discussed the change twice and supports it, though it hasn't adopted a formal resolution; it asked that construction errors be added to the list.

The commission's hearing is 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Z.J. Loussac Library. Whatever it recommends, the Assembly makes the final decision.