Proposed land ordinance going through final changes

Greensboro planning staff and the Citizen Advisory Team will be revising the current draft of the Land Development Ordinance, CAT member David Wharton tells me.

The Land Development Ordinance took a drubbing from the overflow crowd at city council chambers on Tuesday, but the "substantive" changes Wharton described to me sound more like minor modifications.

Wharton said the proposed ordinance is likely to be revised to allow developers to have a minimum of two nonresidential uses in an Integrated Multiple Use Development rather than three. The change allows for an Integrated Multiple Use Development "to be a little more smaller, and it gives it some flexibility," Wharton said.

Is the jargon hurting your brain yet?

Under the new ordinance, an Integrated Multiple Use Development is defined as one "containing 3 or more stores, service establishments, offices or other permitted uses planned, organized and managed to function as a unified whole and featuring all of the following: 1) common driveways, 2) common parking, 3) common signs plan, 4) common landscaping plan. Examples are shopping centers and office parks having the characteristics listed above. Such integrated developments may include outparcels for lease or for sale. Any such integrated development may be organized as a condominium or in a manner analogous to that of a townhouse development (with ownernship parcels beneath the building units and with parking and driveways being in common elements owned and maintained by an owners' association)."

Also, as announced by Planning Director Dick Hails on Tuesday, the street connectivity ratio of street segments to street nodes (intersections, endpoints and cul-de-sac heads) is being reduced from 1.4 to 1.3. The ordinance will also be revised to clarify that the street connectivity ratio will include exceptions for subdivisions bounded by abutting communities with street connection conditions, watershed protections and barriers such as railroad tracks that make it impractical to add street connections.

Another change will allow the billboard industry to maintain larger signs. Wharton said the change is in keeping with a goal in the rewrite process to avoid making anyone's property nonconforming because of revisions to the ordinance.

Staff and the CAT will not take out a provision requiring a minimum of one canopy tree in new residential lots. Former Councilwoman Goldie Wells lobbied for the requirement on Tuesday, but council members Danny Thompson, Mary Rakestraw, Trudy Wade and Zack Matheny have indicated in the past that they see little merit in it. Matheny asked Hails at a recent briefing whether the requirement was still in the document.

If council hoped that staff would do the deed, they were mistaken.

Wharton said the controversy surrounding the provision, including the fact that the CAT remains divided over it, means that it's a political issue that will have to be decided by council.

Wharton said today's Rhinoceros Times (I haven't read it) plays off of alarm at the Tuesday hearing and adds to the confusion. The current draft allows for twin homes to be built on corners and on thoroughfares. Twin homes are not duplexes, Wharton said. Homeowners sometimes prefer to site their houses on the property line to allow for more yard area.

"Twin homes cannot be built on a single family lot," Wharton said. "Twin homes are built each on its lot, although they share a partitional wall. The lot size standards for twin homes are about the same as the lot sizes for a single-family lot. You don't get any increased density."

Meanwhile, at-large Councilman Robbie Perkins predicts the Land Development Ordinance will be approved. He said former Councilman Bill Burckley had good intentions in leading the process that resulted in a Unified Development Ordinance shared by Greensboro, High Point and Guilford County in 1992, but six months later developers had already rewritten Greensboro's ordinance to reflect their own needs. Perkins said he sees it as natural that the three entities would have different ordinances: High Point wants to chart it's own course. Greensboro wants to develop higher density infill. The county has no interest in infill. And if the city of Greensboro and Guilford County want to merge planning departments, their land ordinances are already different and updating Greensboro's would create no obstacles.