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4.0B ACKGROUND 14 4.1The requested zoning amendment stems from the desire to teach classes in support of a 15 Bachelor of Science degree program in nursing in Northwestern College’s office building 16 located at 2803 Lincoln Drive. This property is located in City Planning District 10, has a 17 Comprehensive Plan designation of Community Business (CB) and has a corresponding 18 zoning classification of Community Business (CB) District. This specific location 19 becomes less important, however, if a is approved because the ZONING TEXT CHANGE 20 change would apply to every property within the zoning district(s) in which the change is 21 made. 22 4.2Presently, a college/post-secondary school is a permitted use within the Community 23 Mixed Use (CMU) and Regional Business (RB) Districts, but is prohibited in the 24 Neighborhood Business (NB) and CB Districts. Colleges or other post-secondary schools 25 are conditional uses in the Institutional (INST) District, and business schools are 26 conditional uses in the Office/Business Park (O/BP) District. 27 5.0ZTCA ONINGEXT HANGENALYSIS 28 5.1The zoning code’s definition of a college/post-secondary school is as follows: 29 “An institution for post-secondary education, public or private, offering courses in 30 general, technical, or religious education, which operates in buildings owned or leased by 31 the institution for administrative and faculty offices, classrooms, laboratories, chapels, 32 auditoriums, lecture halls, libraries, student and faculty centers, athletic facilities, 33 dormitories, fraternities, and sororities.” 34 Certainly, this definition can describe a traditional campus setting, and the requirements 35 of the INST, RB, and CMU Districts are intended to ensure that accesses to campuses are 36 limited to higher-intensity roadways to minimize the traffic impacts through residential 37 neighborhoods and to provide buffering and screening between campuses and their 38 surrounding neighbors. The distinction between campuses being conditional uses in the 39 INST District and permitted uses in the more intensive commercial districts seems to be a 40 recognition that a campus is likely to have less of an impact on commercial neighbors 41 than residential neighbors, and the conditional use process allows for greater public input 42 to identify and mitigate potential negative impacts in the more sensitive locations. 43 5.2Planning Division staff believes that the above definition is also meant to describe the 44 kind of nontraditional classrooms that are commonly found in office buildings. Examples 45 could be larger facilities like University of Phoenix (in St. Louis Park), Rasmussen 46 Business College, or National American University (in Roseville at 1500 Highway 36), 47 and smaller ones like Minneapolis Business College (in the Rosewood Office Plaza at 48 1711 County Road B) or “satellite” classrooms for Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota 49 (in Woodbury) and University of Wisconsin-River Falls’ Hudson Center. These facilities 50 don’t have many of the features of conventional campuses and they function more like 51 offices, but they are nonetheless dedicated to academic instruction as opposed to 52 commercial office activities. Allowing such office-based academic instruction seems to 53 be reasonable, and Planning Division staff believes that “colleges/post-secondary 54 schools” were unintentionally excluded from the CB and NB Districts because of the 55 code’s broad definition describing campus and non-campus environments, not because 56 teaching and learning is out of place in an office setting. A similar case can be made for 57 the conditionally-permitted “school of business or trades” in the O/BP District; in this 58 PF12-008_RCA_070912 Page 2 of 4