Council member says planning IS included

City Council member David Howard just phoned to comment on my previous post, "Charlotte's disappearing focus on planning." Howard chaired the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission before he was elected to an at-large Charlotte City Council seat.  He wants to make this point: The council committee, which he chairs, is still named Transportation and Planning. I've corrected the previous post to make that change.

The council's committees essentially divvy up the workload, vetting issues before they reach the full council. So his committee hears and gives preliminary approval to many – but not all – area plans, land use policy changes, etc.  The so-called focus areas are the issues the council makes its top priorities. He said planning has never been a council focus area, "because it's infused in everything."

Since I was fortunate enough to have the chairman of the Transportation and Planning committee on the horn, I asked him about another tidbit I had spotted while burrowing through Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton's proposed budget for the next fiscal year. This is on page 70. Deep in the text accompanying the summary of the Planning Department's accomplishments and focus, etc., under "Service Delivery Challenges," is this:

"One of Planning's challenges is updating this [zoning and development] ordinance so that it reflects desired community characteristics and recently adopted land use and urban design public policy. A more comprehensive update is necessary. This will require a tremendous amount of resources and technical expertise that Planning does not have available in-house and funding is not available. The impact of which will be the inability to fully implement adopted area plans and [not] achieving the highest quality development Planning can in our community." 

In other words – and if you follow my writing this will sound familiar because I have been beating this drum for years – the city-county zoning ordinance needs a top-to-bottom rewrite. The types of development it allows and in some cases requires can all too often completely undercut the city's adopted plans and policies.

I asked Howard about that. He said he had had conversations with Planning Director Debra Campbell about that issue while he was on the planning commission. I asked if the idea of a comprehensive re-do of the city's zoning ordinance had come up at the City Council level. "It hasn't come up to that level," he said.

As a postscript I'll note, just because Charlotte and Raleigh NEVER compete, that Raleigh has in the past few years finished a massive re-do of its comprehensive plan, adopted in 20090, and is embarked on the huge task of rewriting its whole zoning code so that it upholds the plans.  That process is in the public comment period.

1977 Charlotte plan - Back to the future?

From the files of things I found looking up other things:

I was leafing through the dusty old reports my former colleague Tom Bradbury bequeathed, in hopes of finding when Park Road was four-laned, before writing our editorial opinion in the trees vs. sidewalk flap. (I shall note that from what I can tell, most readers prefer the trees.)

The stack of old reports even includes the 1960 Wilbur Smith and Associates "Charlotte Metropolitan Area: A Master Highway Transportation Plan." Cool. Someday I'll read it more thoroughly.

But it was in the 1977 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Thoroughfare Plan, prepared by H.J. "Herman" Hoose, transportation planning coordinator, and W.E. McIntyre, director of the Planning Commission, that I found some interesting recommendations.

They're taken from the 1995 Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 1975. You be the judge of how well Charlotte-Mecklenburg followed those 1975 recommendations (bold-face emphasis mine, in case you are missing the sarcasm):

• To meet the needs of a diverse population, plan for different types and densities of housing in all areas of the community through carefully controlled implementation procedures.
• Plan for all types of services, commercial, governmental and other needs, through carefully controlled implementation procedures to minimize the impact on the land. These to be provided in convenient proximity to residential communities.
• Plan for a more efficient transportation system; for a more equal balance between auto travel and mass transit opportunities.
• Plan for more parks and open spaces to enhance the visual and physical environment of the community.
• Plan for high visual quality of suburban growth with higher density uses located and designed to support mass transit.

Hmmm. About those parks: I heard once that the City of Charlotte went for something like 75 years without buying land for a single park. Not until city and county park departments were combined in the 1990s were any new parks created inside the city. A shout-out to those decades of City Council members throughout the 20th century whose legacies include a sadly park-poor city.

A quick bit of research in the Observer's archives found this from a 1985 article by then-Observer reporter Mae Israel (who's moved back to Charlotte after years at the Washington Post, for those of you who remember her). The piece is about 1985 city candidates' support (or lack of it) for a 2005 plan.

"One policy in the 1995 Plan encouraged city council members to clip the spread of restaurants, car washes and convenience stores along busy streets by denying rezoning requests.
For the most part, they didn't do it. Albemarle Road in east Charlotte, for instance, now is lined with commercial development and choked by traffic. ... (Remember, this was written in 1985.)
"The plan's centerpiece policy called for encouraging metropolitan service centers, or urban villages, to slow suburban sprawl. Concentrating public services, homes and businesses was expected to ease traffic congestion and strain on utilities.
"Politicians never directed city staffers to develop strategies for starting such centers, and the sprawl continued, mostly in southeast Charlotte. "

Of course, I can't be too negative. After all, in 1994 (a short 19 years after the 1975 plan) Charlotte City Council adopted a "Centers and Corridors" concept - not an adopted plan, certainly nothing as specific as actual zoning standards. Since 2008, an effort to update that concept and create more specific policies has been ongoing on in the Planning Department. It hasn't been adopted yet.

I think it takes a heap of patience to be a city planner here.