Back on May 24th there was a special work session of the Pleasant View City Council and Planning Commission. The city contracted with a company to do a sensitive lands study on the foothills area of Pleasant View. The draft report was presented a few months ago. The meeting was a follow up and discuss the final report. According to Chris Pittman he said “In a nut shell it says that we do have some areas that need to be protected.” Chris also stated “how glad he was that Sara Urry was elected to the city that council. When it comes to the land issues in our city she seems to feel much like I do. This means she can do the work on the council and I still get represented.”
In the meeting there was many of the attendees that expressed that we need to protect our resources as a city.
Boyd Hansen has expressed concerns about developers bought the lands up in the foot hills it was zoned A5. They probably bought the land hoping that someday they could develop it. If they thought there was a guarantee of that, however, they can't expect that. There are at least 3 Council members that would need to have a lot more information and time to weigh the options before they would agree to the development.
Steve Gibson has a way about him that leave you wondering about his stand on things. He often starts his comments by saying that if he had his way he would have not had anyone else move in 22 years ago after he did. He then goes on to say that he understands that isn't feasible. Many people in the area wants the small community feeling, knowing that change will happen, knowing this sometimes it’s hard to know his exact stand when he talks about how we should accommodate developers and land owners so they can build more houses. I’m sure that he wants to be fair as the stand of the City Council also to be fair to all. Tony Pitmann stated “The problem is that the developers don't need anyone helping them. They have their lawyers and engineers and a whole host of people to help them get as much as they can. We need all of the city council to stand strong and defend the other 9000 residents of our city.”
Another thing that came out of the meeting was something called clustering, Tony went on to explain what this meant. The basic idea is that if the land is zoned as A5 this means land owners could sell 5 acre lots. If you had a 100 acre parcel this means you could build 20 homes. To build those homes you would have to put roads and everything all over the parcel so that each home could be served. The idea of clustering is that you build those same 20 homes, but do it on half acre lots (for example) in one smaller section of the 100 acre parcel. You could even go with smaller lots as long as the overall density stays the same. This allows you to build fewer roads and use up less overall space. It is cheaper for developers to build and for the city to maintain.
Richard Lewis asked the question “How do you keep the rest of the land from ever being built on?”
Valerie said that there are ways to take away the development rights on the rest of the parcel as part of the development agreement. If this is true then many of the council members are for clustering because you end up with a lot of open space and the same density.
Some have doubts about this. The first is whether you really could prevent the rest of the parcel from being built on forever. There are stories of land that should have been protected that ultimately ends up being built on.
With having a bad experience on the TOD zone. They thought it was zoned correctly when it ended up not being.
Tony also said “The other concern I have is that I hear along with clustering that we would give developers incentives to cluster. The most common is that we would allow them to have a higher density. Why would we need to do that? Clustering is cheaper for the developers anyway. It requires less infrastructure for the same amount of A5 density they have to adhere to now. Obviously with higher density they get more money. I hope the city council and planning commission stay true to the A5 density as we move forward.”
The report is available at the city office.
