While the Citizens’ Planning Committee (CPC) doesn’t expect to realize changes
to the Land Development Code until next summer, the members have presented
specific recommendations to begin the “overhaul” of the city’s land development
process.
At a work session on November 29, representatives of the 22-member committee
suggested that changes to the Land Development Code rules (the legal
interpretation and design standards of the code) come only after affected
parties, such as developers and conservationists, have participated in the
rewrite.
Under the CPC recommendation, the rules could be altered only once every three
months. Currently, the revisions are sprung on the public after having received
only city staff’s input, creating unpredictable and often expensive alterations
to development designs that are often challenged by appeal from the affected
parties.
The group also proposes creating two pilot programs, paid for with public
funds, to improve access to the process. One program would cost an estimated
$225,000 and would allow developers to submit development plans via modem.
Currently, one has to hand-deliver as many as 22 different sets of a
development plan to numerous departments.
The second program would require $50,000 to put the code on CD/ROM or the
Internet. Currently, only hard copies of the code are available, at a cost of
$320, from the American Legal Publishing Corporation in Cincinnati, Ohio. Steve
Wilkinson, a staff liaison to the CPC, says, “We want to get these on the
computer and then develop some software” that would lay out the requirements
for development proposals.
The recommendations are expected to return for council approval sometime in
late January. The committee, comprised of developer, neighborhood, and
environmental representatives, also recommends:
* Creating an Environmental Hazards database to compile a list of potential
hazards like polluted landfills or leaky underground storage tanks. The
information is currently scattered throughout different parts of the city
bureaucracy.
* Creating another database of the city’s numerous neighborhood organizations,
with defined bound-aries, which are constantly under dispute since anyone can
register as a neighborhood association.
* Creating department-specific task forces that will offer revisions to
specific areas of the code and the process as early as this summer. The entire
“overhaul” of the process is expected to last at least 18 months.
* Creating “design charrettes” to follow develop-ment proposals through the
site and subdivision permit processes, and hopefully to identify cheaper and
faster alternatives to the process. — A.M.
This article appears in December 8 • 1995 and December 8 • 1995 (Cover).