Planners talk about goals, set priorities

College Avenue rezonings, green space topics at retreat

FAYETTEVILLE — Planning commissioners on Saturday shared visions for College Avenue, discussed ways to make meetings more efficient and prioritized some goals during an annual retreat at the Fayetteville Public Library.

The nine-member volunteer panel makes recommendations to the City Council on rezonings and annexations. It also has final say on more technical aspects of development, such as conditional land use permits and large-scale and subdivision plans. For the past few years commissioners have gathered yearly to freshen up on policies and procedures, get to know each other and strategize with planning staff. Saturday’s session went from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Rezoning College Avenue between North and Township streets should be a priority this year, commissioners agreed. The city is in the middle of bidding out contracts for road improvements along the stretch.

In 2017 the commission and later the City Council similarly agreed to rezone College Avenue from Maple to North streets. The rezoning kept the commercial aspects intact but added the potential for residential uses. The move also puts less intense zoning districts between land facing College Avenue and neighborhoods to the east as a transition.

Commissioners on Saturday largely talked about doing the same thing for North to Township streets. Specific areas sparked more in-depth discussion. For example, Commissioner Mary Madden said the area from Sycamore to Poplar streets needs fewer curb cuts for safety and better pedestrian access. She suggested buildings on College Avenue should be midsized and closer in proximity.

“There’s a lot of car traffic there but there’s a lot of potential to make it more of a neighborhood center that’s not business, business, business surrounded by parking,

parking, parking,” Madden said.

Commissioners discussed identifying pieces of land along College Avenue that are ripe for redevelopment and reaching out to property owners to encourage them to seek rezoning. Rezoning would not change what’s on the ground. But if redevelopment were to occur, new buildings would have to adhere to the standards of the new zoning district.

Planning staff hope to make progress on the proposal by summer, said Britin Bostick, long-range planning and special projects manager for the city.

Another proposal to associate some kind of regulatory authority within the city’s enduring green network would take longer to work on, Bostick said. The city has a map that plots out areas of connected green space with the intention to let flora and fauna thrive.

The map is just that — a map. It carries no regulatory authority. Commissioners agreed staff should explore ways development within those designated areas would have to adhere to certain standards to protect the natural elements. They compared the proposal to the city’s hillside hilltop overlay district, which has higher tree preservation and drainage standards than flat parts of town.

Commissioner Mary McGetrick suggested having developers put higher density on one part of a property if a certain percentage of the land were placed under a conservation easement. Planning staff would explore ways to have easements placed on smaller pieces of land.

Commissioners also discussed ways to make meetings more efficient. For example, development plans that meet all of the city’s requirements without any variances to code could possibly be approved administratively. The average number of items on the commission’s agenda has increased from eight or nine in 2017 to 11 this year, commissioners saw.

A presentation from Bostick also showed the commissioners that half the city’s land mass is split between zonings for residential singlefamily home development or for agricultural and natural areas. The cumulative number of multifamily permit applications since 2014 has matched that of single-family residential applications, Bostick said.