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Rehoboth sets July 17 public hearing on gross floor area

Definition of exterior walls; underground parking not counting against FAR
July 10, 2020

Story Location:
Rehoboth Beach City Hall
229 Rehoboth Avenue
Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971
United States

A definition of exterior walls. After hours of discussion over nearly a dozen meetings, Rehoboth Beach commissioners are set to hear what the public has to say on how the proposed addition of that definition will affect how gross floor area is calculated within the city.

As proposed, the definition of exterior walls would be, “walls that enclose indoor space.”

The city began discussing how gross floor area was calculated last summer, after attorney Vincent Robertson, representing a Baltimore Avenue property owner who wants to build a hotel with hotel-room balconies, pointed out during a board of adjustment hearing inconsistencies with how the gross floor area of decks, balconies and porches had been applied between commercial and residential construction. Mainly, and without clear guidance in city code, Robertson argued those areas hadn’t been calculated in residential structures, while in commercial areas they had.

The confusion, at the time, was that City Building Inspector Damalier Molina said those areas should have been counted in residential construction but weren’t because his assistant Mathew Janis, trained under a previous building instructor, focused on residential buildings and was applying a different set of standards.

Among those different interpretations was the definition of exterior walls. Molina was counting areas surrounded by railings and knee walls. Janis wasn’t.

Soon after the board of adjustment hearing, Molina issued a statement saying the city’s building and licensing department will use his interpretation for all new construction, commercial and residential.

Almost immediately, commissioners were concerned that a significant portion of new residential construction was now out of compliance.

During a commissioner workshop July 6, Commissioner Susan Gay said she still had concerns with how the definition could be applied to the commercial district. It’s ambiguous, she said. 

Under commercial, Gay said balconies on hotels would be allowed, without being counted toward the size of the building. They want to build to the max, which in city code allows for 50 percent lot coverage and a maximum height of 42 feet, and then add balconies, she said.

Commissioner Lisa Schlosser said the commissioners are simply trying to restore how the code had been interpreted for residential construction for at least the past 20 years. The commissioners could spend the next two years talking about this, but incremental changes need to be made to protect the city’s residents, she said.

City Solicitor Glenn Mandalas said it would be nearly impossible to craft an ordinance presenting a perfect black-and-white definition. He said there’s always going to be room for interpretation from the building official. However, he said, he would beef up the “whereas” clauses at the beginning of the ordinance to better lay out how the commissioners got to the changes.

During the public comment section of the workshop, Robertson asked why commissioners had removed a change allowing for underground parking to not be counted against a building’s floor-to-area ratio. In a separate board of adjustment hearing, Robertson successfully argued, and was subsequently granted a variance, that an 8,000-square-foot underground parking garage shouldn’t be counted toward the same hotel.

Through the months-long discussion, all the commissioners agreed they liked the idea of getting hotel cars off the street, but confusion was raised when they couldn’t agree on a definition between subsurface versus subterranean.

Ultimately, after Robertson’s suggestion, the commissioners decided as long as a proposed project didn’t exceed the city’s height limit, it didn’t matter if a parking garage was all the way underground or mostly underground. Commissioners agreed to allow Mandalas to re-add the underground parking provision to the ordinance. As of press deadline July 9, a new version of the ordinance had not been posted on the city’s website.

There had been other proposed changes during the months of discussion, but ultimately those changes were removed because commissioners decided they were too controversial and continued to bog down the discussion.

The public hearing on the proposed changes to the definition of gross floor area is set for the commissioners meeting beginning at 2 p.m., Friday, July 17.

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