05-29-19 Zoning and Annexation - Laserfiche WebLink

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CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK as a defining moment. There are others as well. I remember sitting around this table and we were talking about zoning reform. He went on, So, the new zoning ordinance format, Mike will get into a bit more detail but there is a big picture philosophy we want to address in this format. We want to support urban outcomes and best practices as best as we can. Why? Urban outcomes deliver far higher,per square acre and per square foot, tax revenue to the City. It builds density and resiliency in the City. We want to ensure we keep doing that. Maybe we've been blessed by the fact we can't just annex huge areas of St.Joseph County. That has stopped us from making potentially bad urban decisions in the past. We have to refocus on this infill. That really should be critical through the coming years. We also want to regulate just the things that matter. This is about making it easy but also saying what our urban values are. They are important to us and so we want to regulate around those, but when it comes to things we shouldn't or don't want to regulate as much, we don't. One(1) of the defining moments for me,my very first(1St)meeting with Larry and Angela,our weekly meeting,there was a variance request for landscaping to an alleyway. I turned to them and asked why the hell would you put landscaping in an alleyway? It made no sense to me. From that moment on, we wanted to look at where those variance requests were coming from and get rid of dumb regulation. He continued, In terms of usability, what is really interesting, as we've gone through this process internally, national blogs and other media have been putting out content that seem identical to our meeting content. It is amazing. One (1) of the things that Strong Towns put out was this idea of usability. Your rules could be great but if you cannot understand them or use them, then they are no good. That goes to even the development plans we talked about last night. If you can't understand it, it's worthless. We wanted to make sure we had a lot more diagrams and tables, and less text. We want more intuitive naming and a lot less cross-referencing. We want to be able to give someone something and let them run with it and go with it. Councilmember Scott asked, Are you seeing other cities in our area do the same thing? Mr. Corcoran replied, We know other communities spend millions of dollars and years to do this, and have it fail. We don't have millions of dollars or time for this to fail. I'm not going to spend my life doing this and not have it work. So, we talked to a lot of consultants initially to see what they had done in other places. In the meantime, Mike did a lot of investigation of codes being implemented in other cities in the Untied States. Cincinnati was one(1), Buffalo, New York, was one(1). No Elkhart or Mishawaka. Councilmember Scott replied, That's fine. To me, it gives us a competitive edge because we understand what's going on with that. Ms. Smith stated,The Area Plan Commission has made an effort to do this with the towns. A town is much easier to do this with. Mr. Corcoran stated, Mike came into my office one (1) day and said, "Tim, we can do this." I looked at him and said, "Mike, do you understand what you're saying?"What you're going to see soon is, yeah, we can write this stuff, but I need like three (3) more Mike's to do it. We met a woman named Jennifer Settle. She used to work for one (1) of the best urban design firms in the country, Opticos. Her parents live in Edwardsburg. She has a 574 area code mobile phone number and she lives in Chicago. She's got two(2)kids. She wants to focus on her family but doesn't want EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574.235.9173 TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 11