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--� —� Variar�c�; ��pticatiQn �#arrative Attachment D Curt and Heather Dubbetdee As a young married couple, like most families, we wanted to purchase our first home. When we found our home on Victoria Street, it was in raugh shape, havin� been abandoned for over a year. However, the potentiat of this property was obvious. The presentation of the U-shaped drive on an expansive front yard leads to a rambler hame nested back from the busy street and shaded by well-established trees. We knew there was much work to be done but with some years of constructian/ remodeling experience between the two of us and the reference of a carpenter father, ��e took the leap and purchased our first home. It has been exactly one year, and we love aur home. We have gutted and remodeled two bedrooms and have just begun our next roam. One of our other anticipated summer projects was to expand the cunent one-car garage into a two-car garage. Since the rambler style house spans most of the width of the property, we were required to file a"set-back" permit ta allow the addition to end three feet from the property line (rather than the usual five feet code}. This permit raised the city's awareness that our property cunently exceeds the impervious surface code by 4%, and would naturally increase slightly with the 200 sq. ft. garage addition. This brings us to the present narrative to support a variance on the code established in 1999, stating that impervious surface shall not exceed 30%. To reduce the amount of impervious surface to code, it was recommended that we eliminate the curve portion of our U-shaped driveway. The following paragraphs lay out arguments for mainta.ining the drive��ay, and allowing this property to remain incompliant with the impervious code. We would first like to address the goal of the code, which is ta reduce the amount of water run-off into the cities drainage system. There are two reasons why we currently do not contribute to this problem. First, our property sits below the street level causing the city's portion of land between our property and the street to incline, which forces all run-off back into our green space. Second, our driveway and property is extremely flat so that any water on the driveway flows onto our green space and any water on our green space remains there and drains into our soil. To nate: The garage addition would contain a gutter system forcing all water fallin� an that impervious surface to drain onto the sandy soil in our backyard. Another issue to be addressed, regarding our driveway, is safety. Cunently, all vehicles (including long work trucks with trailers} are free to exit the property in a forward motion thanks to the U-shaped driveway. If farced to eliminate the secand, curved portion, of the drive vehicles would have to consistently reverse onto Victoria Street and be responsible for watching three directions of vehicles (see fig. 1). The U- shaped driveway permits vehicles to reverse out of the garage, and then drive forward around the curve to exit safely onto Victoria Street.