Agenda - Planning Commission - 12/07/2017

Home

Fenestration Design Standards I Graphic Comparison • Proposed transparency requirements for the ground floor (5096) and upper stories (2596) are illustrated on the first and second stories. • A reduced requirement of 1596 is shown on the third story of the building below, for comparative purposes. Hot -button issues can demand innovative or unique approaches to regulation. Such issues often revolve around a particular development project or trend. Whether you're working as a private consultant or a public -sector planner, having the ability to accurately test the impacts of regulations designed to address these issues —and to communicate the results of testing to enable informed discussion and decision making —is an invaluable skill. Take, for instance, my recent experience with a hospital and its adjacent neighborhood. Neighbors had become concerned that the height limitations placed on the hospital property by the current ordinance were too permissive, and that if redevelopment were to occurto the maximum permitted height, they would find their homes in shadow throughout the day. Working with local planners, and with input from representatives of the neighborhood and the hospital, we were able to test the impacts of a variety of potential permitted heights and required mitigation strategies, such as increased required setbacks from residentially zoned property, and upper -story step -backs. Shadow studies tested the impact of potential adjustments, and the results showed that a tailored combination of increased setbacks, step -backs, and a reasonable maximum building height would minimize any potential impacts on the adjacent neighborhood, while maintaining the ability for the hospital to reasonably expand in the future. Finally, there can often be a chorus of voices that arises to address particularly sensitive development trends, such as an influx of new residential construction that is out of scale and threatening to undermine the character of an established neighborhood. Creating controls to address these types of development trends demands sensitive testing to ensure that they will indeed prevent the negative impacts of such development — but that they still provide the flexibility for people to improve their homes, or for redevelopment to occur in a manner that can meet market demands. Testing can help to make sure that you're addressing the issue at hand, and not creating a separate issue through the adoption of a new regulation. Issue testing can be some of the most important work in updating a zoning ordinance. Specific regulations that address unique conditions must be adequately tested to ensure that they are not creating 15%Transparency 2596 Transparency 50% Transparency unintended consequences or contributing to regulatory tangles that will need to be resolved later on. This type of testing, as it deals with unique issues and solutions, is also some of the more fun and engaging work in an update process. Process Testing As part of an overall ordinance update, staff should consider putting new processes through their paces before they are adopted and enacted. In most communities, an ordinance update does not involve major changes to the way that applications are handled and processed, but even minor changes can have a big impact on workflow. It is important to have a grasp of staff capacity to implement new procedures, or to simply practice the new procedures before they are in place. This type of testing generally involves taking applications received —either during the update process or beforehand —and running them through a parallel internal (nonbinding) process, evaluating them against new standards and ensuring that procedures and time frames established through the new zoning regulations work for staff and ZONINGPRACTICE 11.17 AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION Ipage5