Great News, Good News, & Troubling News

Great News
    Cooking in Central is here!  Load up the family and come out to St. Alphonsus Friday night for music, live auctions, Central’s biggest crawfish boil, and a great time with our neighbors.  Then Saturday just plan on making a day of it.  Central’s annual BBQ cook-off, great food, live and silent auctions, supervised games for the kids, live music, and more.  This is truly a great charitable event.
Good News
    While I and many have expressed concerns over some of the final decisions in the Master Plan process, Central truly is doing the right thing by planning so well to ensure Central grows in the right ways.  Used correctly, Central’s Master Plan is a great instrument for this developing community.
    At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, it became evident that there were a few more adjustments needed to properly consider the rights of property owners, and our council listened.  Taking the matter to a workshop before a final vote on rezoning should ensure a positive and well-considered result.  My compliments to the Council for going the extra step in this important process.
Troubling News
    With rezoning under the Master Plan hopefully behind us in another month, there remains a fundamental flaw in our process.  The process Central has in place to consider individual rezoning requests seems too often to come down to a purely subjective decision on the part of the City Council.  The root cause of this issue is the PUD (Planned Unit Development).
    All developments over 14 units are required to submit a plan (PUD) to the council for approval, but even if the applicant follows every rule in the book, the council can deny the project for any subjective reason they choose. I will devote a column in the near future to further explore this issue, but suffice it to say I’m not a fan of the current process, and the denial of a PUD Tuesday night was a great example.
    Central’s Master Plan calls for the vacant property a few lots south of Sullivan’s Hardware to be Medium Density Residential, and a developer brought a plan, a PUD with 78 homes, to City Council for approval.  The developer had spent over $40,000 in preparing the project and complying with all required studies and documentation for the development, and had arguably met every published standard in Central’s ordinances.  The council voted 3-2 to deny the PUD, with Messina, LoBue, and Washington voting against the project.
    The reason given for denial was that the property is adjacent to an asphalt plant.  You would have had to be in attendance at the meeting to truly appreciate that on one hand representatives of the plant adamantly defended their great safety record and the security of the site, while others cited safety concerns and people breaching the security of the site as reasons to vote against the housing development.  However, this is not the core issue.
    The problem here is that Central makes rules for development, designates property for particular zoning, allows developers to invest significant money preparing a project, then denies the project despite it meeting all of the rules.  In this case our long awaited Master Plan calls for Medium Density Residential on this property, yet our City Council says this property is not appropriate for residential development.
    I heard many promises by candidates in the recent city elections about encouraging economic development, but Central currently has gained a well-deserved reputation for denying the very developments we say we need to support the tax base of a growing city and school system.  I do not want to see Central over-developed, but how about let’s decide what the rules are for developments, write them into our ordinances, and stop making developing property in Central like hitting a moving target.  I maintain that this will mean doing away with the PUD concept and allowing people to simply follow our ordinances instead of having to gain the favorable vote of three council members.  That would be Good News for a Great City.