Utility Meeting

Interesting meeting today. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The good:
Xcel and Comcast have no problems with the proposal. They will use the easements we've drawn up. Comcast (and Qwest, who wasn't at today's meeting), will use a joint trench agreement with City Light & Power when they dig to our new property. L&P preference is to put a temporary system in with the road ROW since they won't know exactly when and how Kechter Road will be improved. When the road is improved, then they will put a permanent system in. We won't even need our neighbors to dedicate easements at this time.

We will need to get a letter from Terry Farril from the water district stating that since sewer is not available, we'll be allowed to install a septic system for the new house.

We will also need to get a letter from REA stating that we can change the current REA easements to say utility easements and then include wording to include REA in the utility agreements. They do not need to access our property except to service the pole that our neighbors service is metered off.

The bad:
The ditch easement and the utility easement cannot be on top of each other. Since the ditch easement is a private easement, a private and public easement cannot share the space. So, we'll need to put the 15' utility easement next to the proposed new ROW and then put the 20' ditch easement behind that.

That means we'll need to move our ditch. We can cross the utility easement at 90 degrees, so we're going to try to keep it on our property, but we may need to feather it up and then back on our neighbors properties. I'm hoping to disturb our neighbors as little as possible. Another option is to create the easements, but not move the ditch at this time since the utility easement won't be used until Kechter Road is improved. We could do all the changes at the same time and then also at the same time as our neighbors will be required to make changes.

Miles was concerned about moving the ditch and JR Engineering was concerned about flows and mentioned that we would likely not get our CO (certificate of occupancy) on the new house until it was done. I think this one won't be too huge of a deal, but we'll see. (Kaching...)

The ugly:
Engineering is still maintaining that traffic planning is going to require the road design, escrow and ultimate construction of the sidewalk. Interesting that traffic planning is causing all of the headache, but has never been to one of these meetings. We've got to set up yet another meeting with traffic planning to sort this out.

We will still plan to have our re-submittal on Tuesday, May 6, but may need to move that if we are going to have to provide design for the road and sidewalk. Susan Joy (Engineering) is going to set up another meeting with traffic planning on Friday to sort it out. I'm hoping we can convince them that it just makes no sense. In addition to my concerns to Susan (posted on 4/25), utilities has a problem with the sidewalk because it will be in their way and they will likely break it up when they do their work. (Kaching, kaching...)

More to come on the ugly.

Still No Word

I still haven't heard from Susan regarding all the utility agencies that I need to deliver the utility exhibit to. How frustrating. I had some time before work yesterday and today that I planned to use to deliver everything, but I don't even know who or where.

I think she's trying to work through the traffic planning issues first, which is fine, I'd love to hear their proposal for resolution, but I thought the utilities wanted these exhibits to review before the meeting tomorrow.

I left another message for her this AM.

Another Small Blip

Helen signed our proposed letter of intent for the utility easement without questions. We had approached her before so she knew it was coming.

I met with Judy on Friday night and she requested more information before signing our letter. Darn. She wants to know exactly what light and power plan to do to her property. So, even though I thought we were in the clear on this, I now have to do more homework. I think she just wants to know what's going on, especially given the development going on around her. I think she really just wants to sell her property.

I hope to see if light and power will go talk to her or maybe I can get enough information to satisfy her needs after our utility coordination meeting tomorrow. If she doesn't grant the easement, they'll just put the power in the ROW and tear up her driveway once. Then, when the Kechter Road improvements actually happen, they'll tear it up again to move it and probably charge us for it...

e-Mail to Susan Joy (Engineering) Regarding Sidewalk

Hi Susan,

I plan to pick up the plans for stormwater, engineering, light and power and transportation planning from JR either this afternoon or Monday when they are complete and take to the utilities outside of the city. Can you list for me who I will need to deliver them to?

Also, regarding the sidewalk:

I left you a message yesterday afternoon, wondering if you've had any more luck on this. A few thoughts I'd like to share:

• We'd be happy to complete the sidewalk when the city completes from the Kingdom Hall development east to connect up to the sidewalk at Sage Creek neighborhood. We just don't see the logic to put the sidewalk in for 224' and barricade it at both ends. If the plan is to complete the entire length along Kechter, then that is fine, let's do it at the same time.
  If the plans for the sidewalk are not in place now and we have to put a short length in and barricade at both ends, here are my concerns:
• It will not get used and will sit to weather and deteriorate. It will also likely require changes when the final sidewalk finally does get installed, requiring us to tear out and re-install.
• In addition, I have small children and see it as a potential hazard and danger to them possibly playing on the concrete pad and either running into a barrier or worse, running into traffic.
• The 2 barriers on both sides will be an eyesore and a potential traffic hazard as people drive by and wonder what is going on.

I hope this is enough to convince Transportation Planning to postpone the sidewalk until such time the sidewalk is completed the entire length of Kechter Road.

Utility Easements

I wish we would have had a good idea about what the city required as far as utility easements from our neighbors before our review meeting. I might have been able to thwart the conversation that took us down a path of needing more review time. Oh well.

Turns out we only need to have our neighbors sign a letter of intent addressed to Steve Olt indicating that they would grant the city the needed utility easement to provide utilities from the church development on the corner to our lot.

We know our neighbors are amenable to this so we'll just need to get a letter signed by them and call it a day. We'll have that for our utility meeting on 4/30.

Lesson learned.

Ditch Co Comments

We've been working with the ditch company and with the Blehm Water Association to ensure that we continue to get our water once we're not in the Blehm subdivision any longer. John Baum, the president of the Blehm Water Association, was ok with us staying in the organization to manage our water. That is good.

The ditch company (John Moen) has been telling us all along that he really doesn't care what we do with our private laterals.

I've wondered why JR Engineering put the ditch company signature on the plat drawings, but probably because there are ditch easements on our property. That's fine.

We got a comment on our submission to the city from Gene Fischer, the ditch company attorney that they would need a $500 review fee. Yikes. Just to look at the drawings and sign something that doesn't affect them in any way. In addition to the fee, we have to have a letter from our engineer stating that the ditch head gate is not on our property and that the property is serviced by private laterals. Ugh.

I wonder where the head gate is? We should probably find out. Which reminds me, our water is coming soon. We haven't heard from John Baum about when exactly and which days we have to put water on our pasture. Miles met with a friend, JD, who has ditch water so he could give us advice as to how to get our water on the back part of the pasture. We don't want to raise our ground water level on the portion that we plan to build the house on.

The Subdivision Meeting

My parents are on vacation, so we planned to take the boys to the drop-in daycare during our meeting. Turns out that the daycare didn't open until 8:30AM - the exact time our meeting with the city was supposed to start. We decided to bring the boys with us and hope they behave. We had plenty of paper and pens that they could play with during our meeting, so hopefully they will have enough attention span to hang with us.

Our meeting started out great - no real hurdles for comments yet. Susan Joy attended from Engineering (instead of Randy Maizland) and started off with very good news. They had been working internally and decided that they would not require us to do the design and escrow of the money for the Kechter Road improvements. Yea! Save us a lot of money (~$24k) and headache of designing something that may not happen for awhile. It would also save us time as they were going to push through to public meeting without another review with the city!

Miles had to leave to entertain the boys while I attended the rest of the meeting.

Justin Fields from Light & Power attended instead of Janet McTague. Justin had some concerns with the power coming from the church property. Janet explained to us that we could ask for easements from Helen and Judy, but that it wouldn't be required because they could just pull it from the current Kechter ROW. Turns out that Justin wasn't so keen on that. We discussed possibly using the REA easement down the middle. But, I knew that both our neighbors were amenable to putting easements across their property. Then discussion went to the ditch easement and the private laterals that run through all of our properties. They don't know if the ditch and the utility easements can be in the same piece of ground, so something that Steve Olt said he'd research for us. In addition, we know that Helen is concerned about the big tree that will likely fall right in the easement. We didn't come to a resolution on this, so Susan started getting concerned.

As the comments started coming forth, Susan had second thoughts about not going through another round of review - darn! So, we'll have to resubmit in a few weeks after we resolve all the issues. She also mentioned that after thinking about it a little more, traffic operations may require us to install the sidewalk along Kechter as part of this project. Ugh.

Drainage was also a concern at the meeting, but we indicated that no changes to the historical flows will be made as part of the subdivision. We are going to pull all the drainage lines back onto our property and deal with the detailed lot grading plan for lot 2 with the building permit.

None of the other comments were really that big. A few typos and wording changes, but other than that looks pretty straight forward.

Next steps are to attend a utility coordination meeting (because of the ditch, power and easement discussion) and plan to resubmit for another round of staff review.

Sub-Division Submittal

On April 1, 2008, we finally submitted the paperwork for our subdivision. We're hoping that there won't be many comments and that we can get through this process fairly quickly. Now that we've decided on a builder and an architect/designer, I am more anxious than ever to get this project moving a little faster.