City board tables former dairy’s rezoning request
The owners of a former dairy on Burchwood Bay Road and Lakeshore Drive want the property rezoned to allow for a single-family home subdivision.
Residents of adjacent neighborhoods want to see a subdivision plan showing the number of homes that will be built per acre, but the owners can’t present that plan to the city until the property is rezoned. That’s the conundrum the Hot Springs Board of Directors attempted to puzzle out Tuesday night, a problem the board voted 5-1 to table until its Jan. 5 business meeting.
In the interim, city directors asked the applicant to submit a preliminary subdivision plan showing housing density in the development.
Two new directors will decide the rezoning request when it comes up again next month, as Marcia Dobbs-Smith and Steve Trusty will replace districts 3 and 6 directors Becca Clark and Randy Fale for the 2021-22 term that starts Jan. 1. Clark voted against the motion to table.
If the board denies the rezoning request, the city code would not allow it to be brought back to the board for a year, unless two-thirds of the panel supported a motion to reconsider the request sooner. City Attorney Brian Albright told the board tabling the request allowed it to be reconsidered at the board’s next business meeting.
The planning commission voted unanimously last month to recommend the Carter family’s application for low/medium density, or R-3, zoning. The 75
acres is zoned rural residential, or R-1. The city’s zoning code established a 1-acre minimum lot size for the R-1 zone, which wouldn’t allow the property to be subdivided into lots for a development the owners’ consulting engineer compared to Forest Lakes Garden Homes off Twin Points Road.
The minimum lot size in R-3 is 7,000 square feet for interior lots and 7,500 square feet for corner lots.
“Less yard maintenance is popular with recent retirees,” Jonathan Hope of Hope Consulting said in a letter to the city’s planning and development department. “We feel there is a need in the Hot Springs market for this product. Forest Lakes is a great example.”
Hope told the board he believed the pending sale to a developer is contingent on the property being rezoned.
The planning and development department recommended the rezoning application to the planning commission, determining the property’s access to utilities and proximity to two major city roads and nearby single-family neighborhoods made R-3 an appropriate designation.
“Carter Dairy Phase 1 cannot be described as rural or remote,” planning and development said in its request for board action. “It is served by utilities. It fronts Burchwood Bay Road, an arterial street. Its owners have ceased their farming operation and intend to convert to urban use — the development of a single-family neighborhood similar to those nearby.”
Residents of adjacent neighborhoods told the board R-3 zoning would increase traffic on Burchwood Bay and Lakeshore, two roads they said are already congested. Many of them opposed the application for medium/high-density residential, or R-4, submitted for the property in 2014. Apartment buildings are a permitted use in the R-4 zone.
A traffic study residents commissioned determined the zoning change would increase traffic volume on Burchwood Bay from Lakeshore to Twin Points by almost 2,000 vehicles a day. The study presumed the zoning change would result in 372 units in a 62-acre area, a density level the city said didn’t account for setbacks or interior roads.
“Doing a study based on a request to rezone is speculative because there is not data that says how many units of housing will actually result from this,” Planning and Development Director Kathy Sellman told the board. “I believe that the engineer who did the traffic study may have chosen a maximum number that may not necessarily be a number that can be achieved by development of this site for single-family homes.”
Sellman told the board traffic increases will be weighed when a request to subdivide the land is presented, explaining that the developer may have to add a turn lane or widen roads to mitigate the increase. But subdivision and development proposals can’t be considered until the property is rezoned for smaller lot sizes, she said.
“We’re just asking for the opportunity to bring you guys a development to look at,” Hope, noting all the elements in place at the property and surrounding area are consistent with R-3’s requirements, told the board. “We can’t bring you a development to look at, unless we get a zoning district that matches with infrastructure and the streets and everything that matches your code. If you just give us an opportunity, we can bring you a development to review.
“But if we don’t get this zoning change, you won’t have anything to review. You may like it. You may not. But at least you can attempt to review it.”