New planning board will have expanded duties

<p>Last week’s contentious decision by the City Council to merge the Planning Commission and Site Plan and Architectural Review Committee will create a board tasked with both design and land-use decisions for future projects.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>Instead of one body deciding whether to allow, for example, a new type of building on a property and another body deliberating over the paint color, those types of decisions will be made by the same people.</p><p>Under the plan approved by the council, the new board will still be called a “planning commission,” but will take on the review of building design, landscape plans, new signs and other areas formerly overseen by SPARC.</p><p>Traditional planning commission duties — granting use permits, variances from zoning requirements and recommending to the council the approval or denial of development proposals — would remain under the new body’s purview.</p><p>Council members who supported the merger said they expect it will streamline and speed up the development-review process, creating one body that hashes out the details of a project before making a recommendation to the City Council.</p><p>Some said the twin duties of the new board — design and land use — aren’t mutually exclusive areas that would better be decided by separate entities, as others have suggested.</p><p>Councilmember Tiffany Renée, who with the rest of the council’s environmental majority favored the consolidation, said having a single board overseeing both duties will benefit future infill projects such as developments near transit hubs.</p><p>“Transit-oriented development is both the issue of land-use and design,” Renée said. “Combining these two committees will deal with those issues effectively and efficiently.”</p><p>Having a single body deliberate over all the details of the project will provide a clear process for the public and developers to follow, Councilmember David Glass said.</p><p>It’s his hope that by the time a project comes to the council for a final decision, “it’s almost a consensus item, because it’s been vetted properly,” he said.</p><p>Glass said the 10 applicants for the new planning commission come from diverse backgrounds that are well-suited for the responsibilities of the new board. The group of hopefuls include most of the sitting members of both bodies.</p><p>Planning Commission chair Kathleen Miller and vice chair Chris Arras have applied, along with commissioners Spence F. Burton and Jack Rittenhouse. SPARC members Dennis Elias and Ray Johnson also applied.</p><p>Other applicants are Melissa Abercrombie, a parks commissioner; Ross Jones, an architect; Jasper Lewis-Gehring, a civil engineer; and Jennifer Pierre, an environmental consultant.</p><p>The council’s decision was not unanimous, with three council members voting against the merger and questioning why current members of the commission and SPARC must re-apply for their seats.</p><p>The council members who voted against the merger — Mike Harris, Mike Healy and David Rabbitt — had concerns about the appropriateness of combining the bodies, as well as questions about how the new commission would operate.</p><p>“I think the public vetting and the appropriate level of detail is better when you have SPARC and a planning commission,” Rabbitt said. “To combine the two, you’re asking for trouble.”</p><p>Healy noted that several decades ago, the Planning Commission had a similar charge — to decide both land-use and architectural details of new development.</p><p>The city did away with that and created SPARC, in part because the meetings dragged on until the early hours of the next morning, he said.</p><p>But a majority of council members said they expect the new commission will help provide a better development-review process.</p><p>Mayor Pamela Torliatt said the meetings should be more accessible to the public because the new commission will meet in the evenings, while SPARC began its meetings in the afternoon.</p><p>And since one of the seven seats on the commission will be occupied by a council member, the council will now have a liaison for design-review and historic-preservation discussions, she noted.</p><p>The city clerk’s office is accepting applications for the commission through Monday, June 29. The first meeting of the new body is expected to be Aug. 11.</p><p>(Contact Corey Young at corey.young@arguscourier.com)</p>