Posted by Kevin Pollem 12-05-2006, 08:41 AM
Depends on who you ask.

Once again, my best advice is to ask a planner at the city. My experience is that the answer you get will depend on who you talk to so you might try asking a few different people.

I can tell you that in Carlsbad, they do expect you to add the ROW easement to your lot size but your setbacks are measured from where the easement stops encroaching on your property.

I can give you an example of a project we did in the city that had a similar issue. It included my client and the city dedicating and vacating lots of ROW for a new project. We first submitted for discretionary approval with 32 units based on our interpretation of lot size but were told, no, we could only have 29 units based on how the reviewer was calculating lot size. To make a long story short, after our Tentative Parcel Map was finally approved after several years, we were told that we had under-calculated lot size (based on earlier information from the city) and we could have had 32 units. I'm sure you know that for developers, the difference between 29 units and 32 is seen as lost profit. However, considering how difficult it was to get the TPM approved, there was no way they were going to try and add more units. Time is money, too. Oh, and in this example the setbacks also started from where the new ROW's stopped, not the orignial property lines.
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Kevin Pollem, AIA
http://www.fakturaarchitecture.com