Group weighs rezoning proposal

FAYETTEVILLE — City officials will take aspects of the College Avenue rezoning proposal back to the drawing board but leave plenty of time for public comment after the Ordinance Review Committee makes any revisions.

The committee, consisting of half the City Council, set a timeline for further meetings on the topic. The proposal went through three rounds of public comment during Planning Commission meetings in April and May that prompted several revisions. The City Council left the item on its first reading earlier this month.

Discussions on how to rezone College Avenue began after the city last year took on a project to renovate the stretch from Maple to North streets with wider sidewalks, trees, lights and signaled crossings. City officials hope to make the area more pedestrian friendly with a mix of commercial and residential uses. New development would bring buildings closer to the street rather than having parking lots and curb cuts cover the landscape.

The current proposal would create a zoning district, urban thorough fare-light. The district would limit building height to four stories, which emulates the maximum 45 feet allowed in adjacent residential districts. Any multi- family developments would have a density cap of 18 units per acre.

Several residents of the nearby Washington-Willow and Wilson Park

neighborhoods made it clear during previous meetings they didn’t want large, studentoccupied apartment buildings towering over their homes. The original proposal would have allowed buildings up to seven or eight stories. City staff crafted the urban thoroughfarelight district as a response to those concerns.

On Monday, Ordinance Review Committee members discussed possible changes to the proposal and tentatively scheduled their next meeting for 4 p.m. July 13. The full City Council would table the item Tuesday and take up a revised proposal Aug. 1.

One aspect of urban thoroughfare-light would measure building height in stories rather than feet. Alderman Matthew Petty suggested the measurement should be consistent throughout the city code, not unique to one zoning district. Matt Hoffman, one of three planning commissioners who attended Monday’s meeting, said putting the measurement in stories rather than feet would more closely align the city’s code with the regulatory language developers and architects are familiar with.

Another aspect of the new zoning district creates a system in which a building could reach up to four stories if the ground floor is an “active space.” The concept, introduced by Planning Commissioner Alli Quinlan, has not been defined in the city’s code and is among topics the Ordinance Review

Committee will take up at its next meeting. Quinlan suggested either designating certain uses, such as grocery stores or restaurants, as “active,” or having building codes specifically for something like a retail use.

Petty questioned the need for the new zoning district and suggested other zoning districts already on the books could serve the same purpose. He also said the city should have its eye on the future and limiting residential density to 18 units per acre would barely sustain a potential transit system, for example.

“It can be a real mistake to try and write an ordinance that is overly responsive to the concerns that people are aware of today, because it can be so hard to be aware of and cognizant of what future pressures we might have,” he said.

Alderman Justin Tennant, who serves as chairman of the committee, said he is in no rush to make a decision, especially since no projects are lined up that need a vote to move forward.

“That part of North College — once you define it — you’re locked into some stuff,” he said. “You’ve got houses a half a block away from that area of town that are extremely concerned about what’s going to happen in their neighborhood.”