I'm helping to come up with language for a town for a suburban site where we're doing a design. Base zoning has a bulk control (which we're way under) and a height limit. The site is on a slope of roughly one story difference, with the lower end of the site on street and the higher end of the site away from the street, and the plan is to inset a parking garage to take up that grade difference. The building will sit, facing the street and forming a street wall, above one side of the parking garage (with the garage in back of the building), which otherwise (in the back of the building) sits under a landscaped at-grade plaza at +1 grade relative to the building but at grade relative to natural ground on the other side of the parking structure, further into the site. - effectively creating a new a new ground in the back yard,. so to speak. The other side of the building, where the street-facing entrance will be at grade (or rather, at the street-facing, as opposed to the backyard-facing, grade) one floor lower than the back entrance, fronting onto the +1 landscaped plaza.

Basically, the building would be +11 floors on the street faciing side and +10 on the back side, facing the plaza above the grade-taking parking structure. The height limit falls midway between the front and the back.

Basically, I want to make an argument that the height plane moves with the slope of the grade, and that the new grade plane should be defined as the new landscaped plaza above the garage in the back of the building, then allow them to let me average the difference between the two. There is no slope qualification for defining the grade plane in the town's current zoning ordinance, as this is one of the few steep slopes in the town.. and height limits relative to the grade plane are simply defined as base of building to the highest building element, making no allowance for cases in which the elevation of the base of the building varies as a result of a slope difference within the zoning lot. They are open to discussing alternatives but they want us to produce language.

Hoping that that y'all can help me with a few examples for where a landscaped area above a parking garage, on a split-level lot, might be defined as a new grade plane... language from existing town or city codes.