03-11-19 Zoning and Annexation - Laserfiche WebLink

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•CITY OF SOUTH BEND OFFICE OF THE CLERK some of the DCI staff time and put it towards strategic neighborhood planning efforts, much like we are doing at the NNN right now. He went on, So, we believe these will help create efficiencies through closer coordination. These are the brief job descriptions(referencing a slide in the presentation). I emailed everybody a larger thing that had a lot more duties and responsibilities than that, but these are the primary responsibilities.The Zoning Administrator is really responsible for making those land-use decision calls but then the Specialist is there to support that. The Administrative Assistant is really for the mailings and phone calls and such. That is a full-time job as well. What we are hoping for is that if there is a little bit of capacity left over in some of these positions because, again, it is all about how much is coming in on a month-to-month basis, I really would like to use that extra capacity to go into neighborhood planning and things like that. How much better can it be when your zoning staff is also helping neighborhoods? I don't think you could get more coordination than when that starts to happen. Councilmember Voorde mentioned something about working together. I want to put it out there that this isn't about not working with other governmental agencies. We plan to continue working with other governmental agencies and this is the list I came up with(referencing a slide in the presentation). We work with MACOG all the time and will continue working with them. Right now,we are looking at a lot of State and Federal funding opportunities. The St. Joseph County Parks Department and the trail coordination. The Coal Line Trail, we are hoping, will connect two (2) county trails and then go up into Michigan. We've even had conversations with Niles about things. The Library, I am on a call almost every week with architects from RAMSA and the St. Joseph County Library,working out the detail on that project. Engineering,the Portage Avenue Bridge upgrades,that was DCI working with County Engineering to make sure that bridge was not a steel rail but nicer. Annexations, Area Plan Commission, Mishawaka, and Brownfields coordination. He continued, This is the make-up (referencing a slide in the presentation). Again, nine (9) members. It is in your packet if you want to get into the details on some of this. The Board of Zoning Appeals composition is five (5) members and has a similar appointee system. This is all State Law. So, some of the challenges and progress to date includes working with the City's Legal Department to really zone in on that time capacity issue. Really, what it looks like is that ramp up to the Plan Commission is where the extra effort is going to need to come. What we think is we could probably hire an outside lawyer to rewrite or write the bylaws. We might even be able to use existing funding in Professional Services or something like that, but we are still in the process of figuring out what that might be. The Innovation team is helping us to map out processes. They try to find efficiencies through mapping out the processes they go through. They are helping us, and they are excited about this. The new staff are absolutely critical in these efforts. We've done all the quick-fixes over the past few years, hopefully there will be a couple more before July, the zoning overhaul is in progress, and we would like to get these new staff hired immediately. The draft zoning ordinance is on time. Our consultant is looking at that and we have external review on that from a lawyer specialist on Indiana Code. They are looking at it before we bring it to our own legal team. Again, it is about reducing workload on our legal team and I feel we are doing a lot to try and do that. We hope to have the zoning ordinance adopted in September and that is when we want to have the ordinance that comes through to formally establish the Plan Commission. It is at that point that we could say January 1, 2020, this takes effect. Council President Scott opened the floor to Committee and Council Members. EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION j INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227W Jefferson Bvld I South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574.235.9173 TTD574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 4