Board approves variance to allow 125 apartments at 100 E. Mason St.; council sign-off still required

The Zoning and Planning Board of Appeals on March 17 approved a variance request to allow Spark Development to pursue 125 apartment units at 100 East Mason Street, a downtown D1 lot, 21 units more than the zoning code’s calculation. The board’s vote followed staff and applicant presentations and a unanimous plan commission recommendation pending council action.

City planning staff told the board the D1 lot is about 2.396 acres and that the zoning code (section 44-620, Table 44-6) requires 1,000 square feet of land per multifamily unit in the D1 district, which yields an allowance of roughly 104 units. Applicant Derek Leibhauser of Spark Development said the project concept mirrors an earlier plan introduced by the Miller family and that a trail alignment and previously executed land swap reduced the parcel area available for the developer’s unit-count calculation.

The applicant described a mixed unit mix of studios through three-bedroom units and said the project will include underground and surface parking (the proposal shows a roughly 1:1 indoor parking ratio plus additional surface stalls, targeting about a 1.5 parking-to-unit ratio overall). Leibhauser told the board he would provide a screening and landscaping plan and noted the team has adjusted the building footprint and parking layout to respond to bulk requirements. He said the proposal does not increase building height beyond what earlier plans requested and that the plan commission had given a unanimous recommendation for the project’s conditional use permit, with final approval by council expected at a forthcoming meeting.

Board members raised questions about the unit mix, whether bedrooms affect parking requirements in non‑D1 districts, and how the trail parcel affected the allowed unit calculation. Staff confirmed the trail parcel is not included in the project land area used to compute the 1,000-square-feet-per-unit standard; had that acreage been included, the applicant said, the project would meet the code’s unit limit.

After deliberation — in which board members cited the site’s unusual parcel history, the prior land-swap that dedicated trail access, and the project team’s commitments on screening and parking — the board voted to approve the variance. The board recorded no roll-call tally; members said “aye” and the motion carried. Approval is subject to the city council’s action on the conditional use permit and to final site-plan and landscape screening details returned to staff for technical review.

The board’s action allows the applicant to proceed to the next approvals with the variance in hand, but it does not remove the requirement that staff receive a site plan demonstrating the screening, tree and shrub plantings and other code bulk and landscaping elements required for final permits. The applicant (Spark Development) said it will submit the screening and planting plan and meet the code’s opaque‑screen and planting spacing requirements as part of the follow-up submittal.

If council or the plan commission declines the conditional use permit or if required screening and site-plan details are not met in subsequent review, the development approvals would not be final. For now the board’s approved variance clears a major zoning obstacle to the 125-unit concept.

Ending: The applicant and staff said they will return to finalize engineering and landscape plans and that council review of the conditional use permit is expected at the next council meeting.