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Historic Preservation Commission Board – March 2025
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The Historic Preservation Commission discussed the importance of documenting lost structures and updating a letter to landmark property owners, last sent in 2018. They proposed infographics to enhance engagement and considered expanding outreach to realtors. The commission reviewed solar panel guidelines, emphasizing the need for sensitive placement and potential public comment. They agreed to use the National Alliance for Preservation Commissions’ guidelines and Denver’s diagrams. The meeting concluded with a motion to adjourn and a suggestion to collaborate with the museum for historic site mitigation.
40:00
You know, identify what is significant, if there is some preservation opportunity, and then whether there is or not, I think this, the other component is important for us as well. So,
40:11
yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. I guess the other thing I can think of to say would be, you know, if, if we’ve already lost some of the more maybe important structures, is there any record? Can we recover any record of them, right in order, in order to basically document right? Is there a is there a photograph that shows those structures in the background that could be preserved and incorporated? Is there some other documentation, you know, another planned sketch, whatever that might be, any documentation that shows what this was at some point so that that story can be told. Thank you for for coming tonight. We appreciate the additional information and background. It is very helpful, and we appreciate your willingness to do that and to kind of continue the conversation. Any other comments or questions on this item? No, all right, great. Thank you. Okay, we will move on to some items from prior business, the first being a letter to historic landmark homeowners.
41:28
Yes, so something that we have discussed is that looks like the last letter we were able to find that was sent, was done in 2018 basically, to landmark owners, saying, Hey, by the way, your property is a landmark. Here’s what that means. Here’s how you can benefit from that. Have confirmed that we can, that we do have some available funds for doing a mailing so we can get that done. So we have prepared an updated letter for consideration. We can beef it up. We can streamline it. I just wanted to run it by the Commission before we started throwing it on letterhead, printing and mailing it out. You know, had an inquiry for someone who wanted to replace a single window that I kind of shot down and told them to come back with a better idea, and it would need to come to the commission. I haven’t heard back from them, but that definitely was a, oh yes, we definitely need to do this moment. So, so yeah, I just wanted to bring that to this commission for discussion, consideration, if you’re good with what we did, if you just want us to recycle with removing the 50th anniversary or 100 and 50th anniversary of the city information from the long from the 2018 letter, we can do that as well. But, yeah, just wanted to bring that to this commission.
42:56
Okay, thanks. Any Commissioner comments. I missed
43:01
the letter. I wasn’t at the letter I
43:04
wasn’t at the retreat. It should be in the packet. In the packet, yes, there is a draft of the packet under 10 a page,
43:10
181
43:15
I’m sorry if you want it’s right there. You can just read
43:22
it. Yeah, the 2018 letter actually has a lot more. Is a bit more detailed. But I just, you know, it’s one of those. Do you send a two page letter that they’re only going to read the what first page of or do you give them an overview with some some links to websites and contact information for more information. So it’s one of those, which approach does this commission prefer? Yeah,
43:46
I’m certainly a fan of short and sweet, but let’s see Commissioner Jacoby,
43:51
yeah, the whole point of this letter is education. So I just have a thought that we may want to pursue or not. You know, I live in a historic neighborhood, and all my neighbors and I go to all the open houses, because it’s always interesting to see what people have done to the interiors, to these old places. And I’ve talked to a number of Realtors when I’ve done this, and a lot of them have no clue as to what historic designation means when an owner buys a property. And I’m wondering, should we send I don’t know how many Realtors there are in town, but and certainly a lot of realtors from outside of town are, you know, selling homes to people here as well, but maybe we should send this letter to realtors in town as well. Just a thought, because proactive education, I think, is so much better than realtor pushing this house on somebody, and then the person comes in all upset and says, I want to replace my windows or whatever.
44:55
There is a Realtors Association in the area, so we could definitely come up with. To put together something that is tailored to the real estate community, for sure,
45:07
I think that might be really helpful, because, as a planner,
45:09
the words that strike me to my core are but my realtor told me,
45:17
yes, I don’t love those either. Commissioner, Tarek,
45:25
yes, thank you. So I mean, I think this letter is very important, and I may have missed something at the treat. So if this was talked about, I apologize. But something that I’ve been thinking about, and something that was a theme of the conference last month was that kind of the first step in getting people to buy in to preservation isn’t necessarily, I think this letter, but trying to reach them in a way that is more personal, that is more emotional for them to understand preservation and like. So what if I want to, you know, change the windows on my house, or I want to demolish this part of my house, or, you know, I mean, I’m just thinking, you know, small but, and so the idea of, and I don’t know if this is a letter or this is something else. This is a different kind of outreach. Or like, Rick was saying education is the idea of just getting people to buy in. And so they were talking about the idea of, like, just making people think about, like, think about three important places in your life, three places that tell, like, your life story, and making them think about it. Place could be there doesn’t have to be there anymore. It could be a place you still reside in, place that’s far away, whatever. And then having them kind of think about the stories related to the place, the people related to the place, emotions, your senses, but having them understand why, preserving and when we say a place that could be so many different things is so important to a person, a family, a community, a city, a state, a country and so and I don’t know, I mean if a letter does this, or something else does This, but if you’re already, if you haven’t already bought in to preservation, and I get this, it’s informative, but if I haven’t bought into it, I don’t think I’m gonna follow up. And so I don’t know if, again, I don’t know if it’s the letter or something else, but this feels like it has to be partnered with something else. So
47:42
I think there’s two different audiences. And feel free to correct me if I’m if I’m misinterpreting, I feel like what you’re talking about is the larger audience of people whose homes, who might live in historic areas, but maybe don’t have a designated home. This would be specifically for people who already own landmark properties to just kind of remind them that, hey, your house is a landmark. And if you want to change something, you got to get you need to come to us first. And also, there are some incentives to help you that you could use that that’s really, I think this is more targeted at people who own homes or own properties that are currently
48:17
over own designated houses. Have a desire
48:22
to have a legal
48:24
obligation. They have a legal obligation. Okay, this is just a reminding.
48:31
I guess I was trying to reach people in a different way. Yeah, so I think they feel more empowered to do it than to just like I have to do this, but I
48:43
think that’s it’s maybe on different audiences, but it’s different purposes. This is just the reminder of, hey, don’t change out a window or knock out a wall outside without letting us know first. And, oh, by the way, you might be able to get some tax credits if you Okay.
48:59
All right, maybe a different audience and purpose?
49:02
Yeah, it might be, but I definitely get what you’re I definitely get get what you’re saying. Is
49:06
there an avenue or a way to have a different purpose and audience, to get people to better understand and buy into preservation? I
49:18
think it might be step two, unless others have a different idea.
49:26
Well, I mean, we certainly have the notion of, you know, there are other properties, other homes, in these historic neighborhoods and outside of the designated neighborhoods that would be eligible for landmark status. And you know, those have not been brought in by the owners for whatever reason, maybe they think it’s overly restrictive and so on. And so I think there’s a broader audience to reach out to, potentially to to. Show them that it’s not necessarily a horrible thing to come in here and talk to us right, that we’re not going to make them do all kinds of things that they don’t want to do with their house. They might still feel that in the end, but I think that that’s that’s maybe a little more what I feel like when I hear when I listen to you talk about that. Now, having said that looking at this, I do think we could make a major improvement by just moving the paragraph around the the leading with the key benefit, and not throwing that at the end, right? Because it’s sort of like a little whack on the hand and then a soothing balm at the end. I’d rather just start with the bomb. So I think that even just reorganizing a little bit of the approach
50:48
is really no that makes sense, okay, but a good thing.
50:52
And then I know we don’t necessarily always have the budget for this, but you know, I do notice in my utility bills that everything’s in an infographic now, because that’s just much more like soluble. So if we have that capacity to cheer this up with a little brochurey Infographic kind of stuff, instead of a letter it might get, it might get paid slightly more attention to, which is also, I will
51:26
defer to my person who has been designed on her computer at the office.
51:33
Yeah, you know it just, it just is reality. I mean, there’s a lot of people, maybe we get half as much engagement just because there’s a couple of pretty pictures and it’s more fun. So fair enough. I appreciate the confidence
51:49
we have some in house capabilities where we can do that now. Excellent.
51:53
I think, well, has any anybody else on the commission got a comment about that? If not Commissioner Jacoby? Hold on, okay,
52:05
Commissioner, Jacoby, I was just going to say that’s an excellent idea, because it’s I, you know, being involved with my neighborhood, it’s so hard to get word out. And if we were to try to send a letter to say every house that’s not designated in the historic districts, that would be a bunch of letters. That’d be very expensive. It’s very hard to reach these people. But I think if we could get into the utility flyer, that would be wonderful, because that goes to everybody and, yeah, and, you know, maybe some comments about how the house doesn’t have to be from 1886 to be historically designated that it’s you know, anything before the 1970s that’s interesting. We would be interested in talking to them about and just providing that sense of recognition of the community as it stands now as an asset. So that’s a great idea.
53:01
Okay, so what I’m hearing then as we infographic up the letter for landmark property owners and reach out to our friends and utility billing to see if there’s a way to incorporate some broader information in the utility bill.
53:17
Okay, yeah, I think that’s good. Let’s see welcome Commissioner Barnard, and you have the floor.
53:26
Thank you. I just My apologies. I some reason, had on my mind six o’clock, and I thought I was 15 minutes early. In fact, I’ve been sitting in my car for five minutes because I didn’t want to get here too early. I had sent a note to Maria, and I don’t know if she mentioned it, but there were two misspellings. Obsessed with Centennial in the treatment minutes extra M got in there somewhere. I don’t know. Okay,
53:53
we did not have the your skill and adeptness available to us. So we did approve the minutes, but I’m sure those minor corrections can be made without any nothing adjustment to the motion
54:07
she has my notes.
54:10
All right, thank you and sorry we missed you earlier. Okay, yes, Sorry we missed We missed you. Yes, yes, yes, yes, thank you. Each shoots and leaves. Okay, great. I think that’s very positive direction. Last big item on our agenda is solar panel standards. We talked about this at a meeting last year, and we talked about it a little bit also at the retreat. So thank you for following up on that. So I’m
54:53
going to bring melaneski up to the podium to discuss this, since she has been spearheading the research and I. Yeah, moving forward. So I guess the question is, you know, we have before us this evening, is the approach to take, and some information, information was provided in the packet. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Melanie.
55:13
Hello, thank you all. Little short, thank you for your time this evening. I’m Associate planner. Work with Jennifer, and I’ve been reviewing these guidelines. We touched a little bit on that at the retreat, just to see if there were any specific areas we wanted to look into. So I did take a look at the Secretary of the Interior, NREL, National Alliance for preservation commissions, as well as local municipalities like Denver. You’ll see some more of the snippets of Denver’s code in the packet as well. It was nice to see there was a lot of similarity between the guidelines across the board, the general principles stand with the intention to preserve the historic structures, energy efficient, efficient features, as they are, porches, operable windows, maintaining the original materials and aligning the installation with our historic preservation guidelines. I think the really helpful aspects of the particularly Denver’s guidelines, shows where on the roof placement would be ideal for historic properties, as well as minimizing the visibility with offsetting some of the panels three feet from the roof lines, and having some direction for screening if they wanted to do it not on the historic structure, but perhaps on the historic property as well. So most of these are going to be best practices that were recommended for various types of roofs, setbacks, accessory structures and installation considerations to ensure that they would be removable from the historic features. I think one important thing to note, or there are some that came up actually at the retreat with the coverage tree coverage often limits the location that you can put for solar installation. So for Denver’s code in particular, they allowed for accessory structures, solar panels to be installed anywhere on the roof. One thing that came up in some other aspects where, if they were be visible from the public, right of way that it should come before the historic preservation commission for your review. So these were general guidelines for staff to sort of get ahead of it before we had any additional applications. So just curious to see how these stand with you, and at what point you might want to see some of these projects come before You know, for accessory structures or corner buildings, those sorts of things,
57:50
great. Thank you. And thanks for putting all that information in the packet. Commissioners, questions, comments. I actually
58:02
have actually have one question, okay, Commissioner Norton,
58:07
so both in your packet and in some of the conversation that I saw on the CLG listserv this week, the free standing solar panels are an option, which I don’t think is something we have as a commission have discussed much is that, you know, we’re thinking about it from a historic point of view, if you’re sticking a pole with something tall on it in your neighborhood, are there additional like committees or planning steps that an applicant would have to go through In addition to speaking to us like, how complicated do these, sorry, different types of solar installations get for the applicant?
58:53
That is a very interesting question. I would expect that we would possibly treat it as an accessory structure of some sort and it would fall under those guidelines. That’s something I don’t know that we’ve had that question arise, and it’s a pretty interesting one, for sure. That’s something we’ll have to talk about internally. I don’t know that we’ve had any any proposals for that, but my expectation is that it would, it would have to meet our accessory structure standards, which typically are that you it has to be, you know, not in the front yard, you know, behind the home of, you know, behind the front plane of the house. So I don’t see why we wouldn’t treat it that way. Okay,
59:36
sorry, I turned my mic off and then realized I might have a follow up in that case, is that the type of solar installation that would even come in front of this commission. Are there certain ways that we could streamline that conversation? And I’m I don’t have an opinion either way. I don’t know how this commission would feel about that. Yes,
1:00:00
my guess would be, if it’s a landmark property, that it would right, but if it’s not a landmark property, then it wouldn’t necessarily. Is that
1:00:08
it seems that we would probably treat it no differently than if someone wanted to put a detached garage or an adu on their property, it would need to come just to ensure that the placement was sensitive.
1:00:21
I can tell you from experience, working in another municipality that didn’t have any regulations on wind, windmills, basically, you know, structure, and then somebody put it in their yard, and the entire community went completely nuts. And I was serving on a planning commission at that time, and we spent six months writing wind struck, you know, a part of a development code language for you know, how to deal with these wind and solar installations. And then no one ever built another one after that. So guessing it wasn’t a cute Dutch windmill. No, it was not. But it just takes one right, one person who wants to fly a pole of canopy photovoltaics and the name of green whatever and all hell could break loose. So it’s a good question. Other questions, comments.
1:01:34
Commissioner Sidley, yeah, so I was looking in the packet about the free standing and detached ones. And there, there are mentions in that about, you know, having it not visible from right aways and things like that. And I didn’t see anything additional that, you know, like from what you guys brought up. I mean, what, what Denver has already written seems pretty decent. So just wanted to throw that in that it seems like that’s pretty I couldn’t think of anything else other than what Denver already wrote.
1:02:12
Okay, thank you. My comment would be, I really like the the historic preservation the National Association of historic preservation commissions. Simple set of guidelines, because, again, it’s got a lot of pictures, nice, big text graphics, like you’re trying to give the homeowner this thing. They’re not gonna. They are not reading the NREL report. It’s not happening. If, if, I think it’s good to be aware of it and to, you know, if someone came in, you know, who’s using an architect, and they had a bigger project and they wanted to do this, and they weren’t really aware, you could say to their architect, Hey, have you read this report? Because we’re people who read stuff like this, but a homeowner is not. Maybe an Uber excited engineer might, but most people will not. So I am in favor of using that, the Alliance Preservation Commission, sorry, guideline, as our kind of referral document, and along with that diagram from the Denver one, right, because it just really super clearly illustrates what is good and what is not. And then maybe leave it more or less at that, with the caveat that, yeah, if you want to, you know, again, at Staffs discretion, if it’s, if it’s on the backside of an accessory building, off the off an alley or something, because that’s where it faces, it’s probably no big deal. And if it’s somebody wants to do something that’s really going to have an impact on street front, it’s street front, then they ought to come here, right? I mean, that’s just the kind of common sense thing. So that’s, that’s where my head is going. Let’s see Commissioner Terek,
1:04:15
I was first going to say, I agree very much with you, and I was looking at, what is NAPC Is that what it is the standard two and standard nine, where it said conform to the Secretary of Interior standards, and both of those recognize like where it says, new additions alterations, but that need to protect the historic integrity of the Property and its environment, and it talks about so the environment could also be, you know, your yard or your space around your house. So I thought both of those standards kind of fit nicely, and we could use them to help. If it’s something free standing,
1:04:58
that’s good point. So.
1:05:02
Anyone else with any comments? If not, then staff, do you feel like you have a decent amount of direction as to how to handle this? And I don’t know that we need any kind of formal motion for this, right? I don’t think
1:05:17
we do. I think it’s just directing staff. Should we receive inquiries regarding solar panels in the future to use the NAPC and NAPC guidance document, plus the graphics from Denver to help direct applicants in the right direction. Great. And so if it’s and so if it’s and if it’s something visible from the street, we would bring it to the commission. If it’s not, then it can be handled administratively. That’s what I’m getting. And then if it’s free standing, if, for some reason, we get a weird freestanding get a free standing one, I that’s something I would need to discuss with our planning team, but I anticipate we would treat that like an accessory structure.
1:06:02
Okay, okay. Commissioner partner, yes,
1:06:07
Steve, I thought this would probably be this was a good discussion. I learned a lot from it, and I think the direction is good, but I also think this something that we should post for public comment, because this is going to affect how people are choices that people are going to be able to make. And you know, when we when we change the way that the system is going to operate, I think we should get some input into it.
1:06:39
That’s a fair point. I mean, essentially that would involve making an official basically putting this back on the agenda as a public hearing item, saying this is our plan. Basically everything, Jennifer, that you just brought back, essentially putting that in a package saying this is on the agenda. This is a public comment. And if anyone that I think that’s a good idea, that way, if anyone really does care and want to, want to talk about it, they can come and we’ve, we’ve done that due diligence, and if no one talks about it, no one has any new ideas, then we can just stamp it and let it go away. But I think that’s fair, that’s good, that’s a good
1:07:15
point, and I’ll, I’ll confirm that direction with our council as well. Okay,
1:07:21
okay, great. Thank you. Commissioner Burnett, all right. Thank you. Thank
1:07:26
you very much. So we’ll plan to post this for public comment, essentially, unless I get direction otherwise from our legal team, post it for the April meeting, the April meeting, not the August meeting.
1:07:46
Yes, okay, sounds wonderful, all right. Well, great that that was a lot in an hour. So thank you. Yeah,
1:08:00
up. All right, do any of our HBC commissioners have any comments that they would like to make? Yes. Commissioner Norton,
1:08:15
yeah, just following up on our boat pray farms conversation as we start talking about potential, like mitigation for the historic site, I wonder if it would be worth talking to the museum and Eric to see if there are, if there’s anything on their wish list that you know we could ask for, for talking about other types of recording or getting the story out, in our spirit of collaboration,
1:08:45
it would appear that I have an opportunity to do that on April 18, at 230
1:08:55
great I appreciate that either of our reserve commissioners have anything they’d like to offer. No, okay, thank you. All right, and we do not have a representative from City Council present this evening, so at this point, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. Oh, I’ll
1:09:18
make a motion to adjourn.
1:09:22
You. And a second okay, we have a motion to adjourn from Commissioner Norton and a second from Commissioner Jacoby. All in favor. Aye. All right. We are adjourned. Thank you all for your time this evening,
1:09:36
we were a punchy group applause. Tap,
1:09:40
tap.
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