Planning Commission mulls setback requirements

The Nome Planning Commission met to discuss updates to Nome’s zoning code and construction within the flood plain during their meeting on Wednesday, November 3.

During the meeting, commissioners discussed new business brought to them by City Manager Glenn Steckman, who requested the group review existing setback requirements along Front Street and Bering Street, where many of Nome’s businesses and restaurants reside.

In most construction and development projects, a setback is the minimum distance a building must be from the road. In Nome, the setback requirement is 10 feet, minimum, from all dedicated rights-of-way, according to Nome’s zoning code. It also requires structures to be placed 10 feet back from the top bank of a drainage ditch, 10 feet from a closed drain system, and five feet from all lot boundary lines. The current guidelines are challenging, and often cost-prohibitive for business owners who want to update their older structures in the business district.

“If we look at our existing Front Street, it’s prohibitive for either existing businesses to try to do something with their old buildings, or for new businesses to come in and try to purchase a property and consider maybe tearing down something that’s already faulty and be able to reconstruct [a new structure] in the same footprint,” explained Common Council Member Mark Johnson. “Because currently we have these setbacks, it doesn’t really work.”

Johnson, who attended the meeting as a civilian and spoke during the public comment period, said the existing city code makes future development challenging.

“If the idea is to create economic development, we’ve got to make the most easy path,” he explained. “The setbacks is a simple thing to fix.”

Earlier this year, the planning commission conducted a survey regarding future development in Nome. The survey asked several questions regarding business and infrastructure development. Of the 228 respondents, more than half indicated support for continued development along Front Street, despite the area’s location in a flood zone.

Commissioner Gregory Smith, who helped develop Nome’s current zoning guidelines, says there are alternatives to redoing the existing code.

“When we [wrote the zoning codes], we did the setbacks according to national standards, local standards, fire marshal standards; they’re a one-size-fits-all for all communities,” he explained to his colleagues. “What we did build in is called a variance process, which has been overlooked in many of the discussions that I have seen so far. For each individual property, a variance can be applied for to relax the setbacks.”

Individuals can apply for variances at their property when “there are special cases where unusual physical features (including small lot size), location within a commercial district, special design features which can be incorporated into the structure, and the limited building season make strict application of the foregoing regulations unreasonable,” according to Nome’s code of ordinances. Currently, variances can be granted to relax current regulations, but cannot be granted exclusively because of financial hardship.

Smith says individuals who want to build and develop properties apply for variance requests, though suggested the City explore lowering the filing fees for the request.

“The fee on filing for a variance has been a little cost prohibitive,” he said. “Maybe we can relax that.”

Other commissioners disagreed with Smith.

“A variance should be an exception, not the rule,” said Commissioner Mathew Michels. “We should update the rules.”

Michels said the commission needs plan for a more developed city moving forward.

“We should be working on standardizing an idea of what Front Street development should be like so there is some uniformity to it,” he said. “Considering things like port expansion, there’s a lot of property that’s going to eventually become pretty prime real estate that is below the flood plain. We should be thinking about that and saying, ‘Okay, these are the steps that you need to have in place in order to be able to utilize that property.”

Commissioners went back and forth during the discussion and opted to push further discussion regarding existing zoning regulations to a work session in January 2022.

The commission also discussed ongoing projects and concerns, including Nome’s Historic Preservation Plan. The plan, initially submitted to the Nome Common Council over the summer, is a document designed for financial grant applications, and does not serve as a comprehensive history of the city. The document received significant criticism during the July 26 Common Council meeting, and the Council opted to send the plan back to the planning commission for editing.

During their September meeting, the planning commission opted to leave the document as-is, and said they would review comments from the public, including those submitted by Austin Ahmasuk, who testified about the plan in front of the Common Council and the Planning Commission earlier this year.

The planning commission returned the document to the council. Eileen Bechtol, Nome’s city planner, said the Common Council would review the plan during their November 8 session. The Council did not as the issue was not on the agenda of Monday’s regular Common Council meeting.

“I had a serious problem swallowing this plan as a product, and only agreed to pass it out of us because it was just a starting point,” said Ken Hughes, chair of the planning commission. “I’m a little confused about the commitment of the City Council to even fund the level of work that’s necessary for real commitment to this process.”

Ahmasuk presented the commission with a detailed analysis of their existing historic preservation plan, noting significant errors and omissions of indigenous culture and history in the region from the plan.

“There is so much more work that needs to be done in terms of really making a good historic preservation plan,” he said. “Our discussion should be about how to proceed as opposed to how do we incorporate a couple of comments from one source into a document that is so flawed already that it doesn’t meet our needs.”

“[Ahmasuk] has some really valid points,” Michels said. “For example, Nome Eskimo Community isn’t mentioned at all. The history of this place is more than just buildings. This place was here before buildings were even here and a lot of the information that was presented was in the wrong context. Rather than say it’s an amendment to the plan to approve Austin’s comments, I do think we should go through the comments that he made and evaluate them at merit individually and figure out how to incorporate them into the plan.”

The next step is for commissioners to review Ahmasuk’s concerns, as well as gather other comments and critiques from the public, to determine how to turn the plan into a “living document” that includes Nome’s indigenous history.

The commission opted to push further discussion of altering the plan to a work session, scheduled in early December.

The next planning commission meeting will take place on December 7 at 6 p.m., with a scheduled work session beginning an hour before the meeting.