Just a couple of quick reminders for our gentle readers:
1) An Emerald City Planning Commission work-session is scheduled for 5:00 this afternoon for the purpose of discussing Boss Godfrey's controversial sensitive zone overlay zone and so-called mixed-use ordinances:
When: Wednesday, January 17, 2007, 5 – 7pm
Where: 2549 Washington Blvd., Room #310 Ogden, UT 84401
Gentle reader Dan S. earlier provided us an overview of tonight's commission agenda, which comment can be viewed here.
Dan S. also sent us some additional material this morning relevant to tonight's worksession, so interested readers should be sure to check out the following documents, which we assume to have been submitted on behalf of the Ogden Sierra Club:
Although the commission rules prohibit public comments during this work-session, the meeting will be nevertheless open to the public. We do hope a few steely-eyed Weber County Forum readers will plan to attend this event, and perhaps report back to us on commission discussions and actions which transpire during this evening's work meeting.
2) We would also like to remind our readers that the clock is running for the public to submit their comments on the Peterson development proposal to the Emerald City Council. The council has requested your input, and comments received by the council prior to January 23 of this year will be considered by the council as it prepares a resolution outlining steps toward reviewing the Peterson proposal -- assuming it ever arrives at all.
Council contact information is available in the WCF upper-left sidebar; and for the convenience of our readers, we also provide that Emerald City Council contact link here.
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7 comments:
Mirror, Mirror on the wall
Who's the smartest guy of all??
Citizens, Citizens on the ground
Who's the smartest guy around?
DAN SCHROEDER!!!
Too bad you're so darned smart, informed and able to cut thru the babble to make such good sense....otherwise YOU could be appointed to the Planning Commission.
Thanx, Dan
Or you could be the Chief of Police who was elected to the State Senate
Who said that? You better not be a police officer or me and the Mayor will fire you for nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Amer Sports Oyj (formerly Amer-Yhtymä Oyj) is a Finnish sporting goods manufacturer, originally established in 1950. Initially an industrial conglomerate with interests as diverse as shipowning, tobacco products and publishing, Amer has gradually evolved into an organisation devoted to the production and marketing of sporting equipment. Today, the company employs over 6,600 people, is a component of the OMX Helsinki 25 share index, and owns the sports brands Wilson, Atomic, Suunto, Precor and Salomon.
The company began life as a tobacco manufacturer and distributor, Amer-Tupakka, in 1950 and acquired the right to produce and sell Philip Morris cigarettes in 1961. [1] In the 1960s, the significant profits from the company's tobacco interests were invested in three commercial ships. A publishing and printing division was added in 1970 with the purchase of the Finnish company Weilin+Göös, and the company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1977, four years after changing its name to Amer-Yhtymä (Amer Group). In the 1980s Amer moved into the vehicle import industry by acquiring the firm Korpivaara, and with it the exclusive rights to import and distribute such brands as Citroën and Toyota. The decade also saw the company expand into the textiles and plastics markets.
source: wikipedia
AmerSport made it's money in tobacco and branched into healthy sport products, eventually dropping tobacco. Interesting transition, getting out of an industry that encourages addiction and hastens death to one that encourages fitness. The Finnish are thoughtful people.
Quick report on last night's Planning Commission work session:
The session lasted about three and a half hours, with dinner provided for commissioners and staff. All commissioners were in attendance.
They discussed the Sensitive Area Overlay Zone first, and in more detail. After dinner they discussed the Mixed Use Zone. In both cases the commission is asking for what I consider to be improvements to the draft ordinances that they saw last fall. However, their comments to the staff about desired changes were pretty vague, and when the staff argued back, the commissioners (with rare exceptions) tended to back down and accept what the staff said. So I think we'll see some changes to the language when these ordinances come back to the commission at its Feb. 7 meeting, but it's hard to predict what the changes will be.
The staff did indicate that for the mixed use zone they intend to stick with the requirement of a development agreement between the land owner and the city, and that they'll use an ordinance from Sandy (which doesn't call it "mixed use" but does have standards for what's expected) as a model. It isn't clear to me how such an ordinance could work for the River Project, and it sounds like the staff are still confused about this as well. It also seems to me that such an ordinance will work only for large development projects. There doesn't seem to be much sympathy for small land owners.
I attended the PC work session, first half [discussion of the proposed changed of the sensitive area overlay ordinance revision] and I can add a little detail, and perhaps a slightly different take on that part of the session.
When the discussion was over [just before the dinner break], the chair of the PC tried to summarize the sense of the meeting on two key points. None of the members disagreed with her summary. She said it seemed clear that the commission did not think [as the planning staff and administration had proposed] that a revised SAOO should deal only with matters of constrcution safety, but that it should also concern itself with other matters [as the existing ordinance does] like preservation of open space, wildlife habitat, viewscapes and the like. And second, it seemed to her that the sense of the meeting was the revision of the ordinance to expand it to new areas and perhaps revising the absolute ban on construction on lands sloping in excess of 29 degrees as well as drafting protections for other important concerns [as noted above] should happen simultaneously [i.e. that the planning staff should not present a revision of the ordinance eliminating protection of habitat or open space etc. and those matters to be dealt with in a separate ordinance at a later date.] As noted above, no one on the commission disagreed with her summary.
There was no agreement however, on how provisions dealing with other matters than construction safety should be arranged. Two different possibilities were discussed, but I don't think a concense as to which was best was achieved by meeting's end: one suggestion was to create a new zoneing category specifically for foothills as Salt Lake City did. It might be called FR-1 Zoning for example. [Foothills single family residential.] The second possibility was to build into the SAOO two separate sets of criteria, one dealing with construction safety, and the other dealing with preservation of open space, etc. But that both goals --- revision and updating of the SAOO safety provisions and provisions to protect other "values" in the area --- must be included, and adopted simultaneously, did seem to be accepted by the commission without objection. The matter was then kicked back to the planning staff to implement.
There was much more discussed as well, particularly concerning whether Transfer of Development [TOD] rights was a strategy that might be used to good effect via zoning regulations in the Ogden foothills.
Comment: I was impressed, have to admit, at the PC's discussion of the planning staff's proposals as presented by Mr. Montgomery. The members raised significant concerns about various elements of it, discussed it from a variety of points of view [including that of developers], brought in the experience of other towns and cities with similar ordinances and different approaches, and referred to the commission's own practices in the past and how those should inform the drafting of a better ordinance.
One of the commissioners [I am sorry that I did not get his name, but I was not taking notes], when the planning staff suggested that safety should be the only matter considered in revision the ordinance, said that he noticed that whenever the city did a new community plan, people said, loudly, that preservation of the foothills, of the open space there, of the views, were matters important to them. He added that that came from not one neighborhood, but again and again, whenever a community plan was done, and that he thought the commission needed to take such views, so often expressed, seriously. As I recall, most of the commission seemed to concur.
The commissioners' discussed for some time the difficulty of balancing "private right" and "the public good" in making and revising zoning ordinances. Their discussion on that was, I thought, substantive, informed, and interesting. I learned a lot from it I had not considered before.
I am not as a rule impressed by government bodies at work. Generally the reverse, in fact. I was impressed by the PC work session. Seemed to me to be largely citizen volunteers doing their damndest to consider fairly competing [and somtimes mutually exclusive] interersts, to inform themselves about what was being proposed, to consider alternatives and consequences, and to do it all in light of the public good [though they disagreed at times about what might best achieve that]. Overall, as I said, I was impressed.
Now, whether the Mayor's planning staff will take what the PC did agree on and seriously try to implement it in a revised ordinance we will, as Dan S. cautions, have to see. As we will have to see how the PC will deal with matters if the planning staff does not.
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