by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
Creating a suitable site plan is often a process marked by compromise and numerous revisions. But after a developer, a neighborhood and the City Council sign off on the plan, some Council members say the changes made after the fact are getting out of control and need to be more closely monitored.
Council member Art Graham introduced legislation this week that would require a district’s Council member’s signature to accompany any modification to an approved Planned Urban Development.
Modifications to a PUD can be as minor as rearranging parking or enlarging a retention pond. The practice is common, but Graham said “minor” was the last word he would use to describe revisions made recently to a project in his district.
“We went from having a nice town center development, something to complement the neighborhood, to your typical, run-of-the-mill strip mall,” Graham said of a planned development in the Bayard community off Phillips Highway. “The changes that were made were completely unacceptable and nothing I was ever going to allow to be built.”
That particular development, which Graham said he caught by “complete accident,” was referred to as an “oversight” by the City’s Planning Department and never moved beyond an early engineering stage.
Graham said steps need to be taken to prevent similar situations from happening again.
“I don’t want to slow the process down any more than it needs to be,” he said, “but we’re caught in the middle and we need to be able to have a better say over the final product. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else again.”
Council members Lynette Self, Michael Corrigan, Art Shad, Suzanne Jenkins and Sharon Copeland said they, too, have been victims of some not-so-minor modifications.
“It’s got to stop,” said Copeland, “because these changes are happening and we don’t even see them until after these developments are built. By then it’s too late and that’s when we start getting calls from angry constituents.
“Do we need to be signing off on these minor mods? Absolutely.”
Jenkins said she has had her share of phone calls from angry constituents who were unhappy with a product that was far different from the concept approved by the Council.
“And what are we supposed to say when we don’t even know what’s happening?” she said. “The damage is done and we’re the ones with egg on our face.”
Copeland, immediate past chair of the Council’s Land Use and Zoning Committee, said she may offer an amendment that would further clarify what exactly defines “minor.”
“I think we have to because I look at some things that have been built in my district and it’s horrible,” said Copeland. “If we have to rewrite the book then that’s what we have to do if it’s the only way we’re going to get what we agreed on.”
Currently both administrative and the slightly more dramatic minor modifications to planned development concepts must meet a litany of requirements before being able to be reviewed by the mayoral-appointed Planning Commission.
Requirements for the latter mandate that the general location, number of units or floor area must remain the same. Minor modifications must also be advertised for 14 days prior to a public hearing regarding the matter.
Graham, who at one time hoped to get his legislation passed without working its way through the Council committee cycle, said he looks forward to “straightening out the process.”
The mayor’s office offered little by way of rebuttal saying, “We’re looking at it.”