Building height of apartment plan questioned

Forty feet tall or 50 feet?

That's the question the Kalispell City Council must answer sometime in April about a proposed 65-unit apartment complex.

The city's planning staff briefed the council Monday at a workshop.

Calaway Brothers LLC wants a conditional-use permit to construct an eight-building complex plus a 2,000-square-foot clubhouse on 4.8 acres between Meridian Road and U.S. 93 North. The complex's entrance would be on Meridian Road.

Two of the proposed buildings would be 12-plexes roughly 50 feet downslope from U.S. 93 North.

The Planning Board recently recommended that the council approve the complex with a 40-foot height limit (the legal limit) on the tallest buildings.

Calaway Brothers wants a height of 50 feet.

The developer wants to put underground parking lots beneath the 12-plexes' first floors to create more green space while requiring less parking elsewhere on the site. Those garages would open to the west.

If the garages are counted as the bottoms of the buildings, the two 12-plexes would be 50 feet tall, but only 40 feet from the first floor.

The two 12-plexes are on a slope -which would put the top of a 40-foot building 10 feet above the level of U.S. 93 North. A 50-foot building would be 20 feet above the highway's level.

If the garages are not allowed, the first floors would drop 10 feet and more parking would have to be installed elsewhere on the site.

Council members gave no indication Monday about how they leaned in this matter.

This is a revived 2004 venture. A conditional-use permit expired when the project stalled a few years ago.