City of Thibodaux Zoning Review - South Central Planning ...

Thibodaux Zoning Review 2010several of which those we will content with and those that we hope to hear by the comments thatwe will received, so I’ll help distribute these boards. Mr. Belanger stated I know they are a littledifficult to see, with me tonight is Ms. Simone Caesar, she is a planner who is heading up therezoning. Part of what we wanted to do is give you food for thought of what other communities oflike size and development patterns for liking what they’re doing in the hierarchy of the zoning andwhat we want to do is to be able to what I’d like to do is maybe take 4 or 5 minutes for you to beable to just come out and look at the maps, get a feel for what they are, we tried to choose theselocations because of their population, their population make up, they are university towns, etc.We’re not here tonight, I want to preference all of this, we’re not here tonight to talk about specificsof conflict, what we want to hear are generalities, we want to be able hear that you feel that maybethere should be more, instead of I heard it called today undeveloped land, in many other areasthey are called open land and vacant agricultural property, maybe that could help to define yourproblems in some of your issues on open land or what we call undeveloped property. So it wecould for just 4 or 5 minutes, just get up and look at these maps, try to look at the hierarchy and thetypes of differences of the hierarchy and then what we will do is try to look into some comparisonsas what Thibodaux has and then we’ll ask questions and stimulate a little discussion. Mr. Kearnsstated Kevin what you don’t have is a description… Mr. Belanger we actually have it, there is noway we would have put it on a board but if you want to look at some of those descriptions of thehierarchies of the zoning, we have it. Mr. Kearns replied yes. Mr. Belanger stated we can forwardthat to you. Mr. Kearns replied yes I’d be curious to see how they are defining what those zones.Mr. Belanger replied ok, let’s go ahead and get stared, what I’d like to do at this point is call up Ms.Simone, she is going to stimulate some of the discussion, first of all there are no dumb questions,we want to hear all of your input, if you can’t make it tonight, you can please email it to us and wewill give out a pamphlet so that you can kind of follow along, does everybody have access to that.Ms. Simone Caesar came forward and stated good evening everyone, my name is Simone Caesarand I am the lead planner on the zoning review for the City of Thibodaux. I’m going to open thefloor up so you can just open discussion but before I do that I wanted to give a little back ground asto what you might expect, last year, about the 2 nd of last May, the local chamber of commerce didan informal survey where they went to the R-1, R-2 and R-3 areas to identify non-conforming usesand they found several I believe there was like about 104 properties and it caused some concernsto them and they brought that to the City and the concern became what happens when thesegrandfathered non-conforming uses become vacant, how would that impact the City economicallyand so with that the City asked us, South Central Planning to come in and do a zoning review.Part of that review will require us to look at the ordinance and identify I guess some vagueness inthere and see if there, look at clarity and hierarchy of the zone, also compare it to other places thatwe were looking at the maps here, what are other people doing. Just bringing up similar issuesbased on ways to build on something that is successful, can that be replicated here, will that workhere in the City of Thibodaux. In addition and the reason it brings us here tonight is that we’reholding several meetings to get your input as developers, as the planning commission, as theadministrators here in the City and as the public at large. Now each of you received a booklet andit is just a booklet of discussion questions and it is not meant to be everything but it just meant tobrowse through it is to generate thought and conversation and like I said you can go through andread every page or you may come across one question that really generates some thought andcompassion to you and we can discuss that. As Kevin mentioned earlier I put my card on the bookso maybe there’s things after the meeting that you’ll remember and say “ah” here’s a thought andyou can email that information to me as well. What I wanted to do is as I mentioned is open thefloor up for discussion and as Kevin touched on the purpose of tonight’s meeting is not to speakabout your specific issue, what is happening at your house on your lot but what is happening inzoning around the City; how is it impacting you as a resident here and if there was a change madeto this zoning how will it not just affect you but the residents at large, will it change the quality of lifefor all citizens or what. We admit zoning issues may cause problems but if we could just improveit, just fix this quality of life here would improve significantly. So those are the kind of issues thatwe’re looking at to address them and as I said also the thing to identify is that there wasn’t enoughbuffer so there are some areas that didn’t have buffers between residential and commercial and sothat was a concern also so with that I’m going to open the floor up, does anyone have any issuesthat they would like to discuss? I also have the maps here, these maps were, as our team drovearound we looked at some of the areas and identified areas where we thought maybe someconflicting uses, we’re not quite sure what was happening, so we blew those areas up and putthose on a map and so I’d like, these big maps, I have 10 here because as we talk we could alsoidentify locations that you all are targeting and that would help us better understand the issue ofwhat is happening. So with that I’d like to open the floor up, if anyone has anything they would liketo discuss. Mr. Kearns asked do you still have the other maps that you had shown me that alreadyhad the writing on them. Ms. Caesar replied not with me. Mr. Kearns stated but you do havethem. Ms. Caesar replied I do, yes, they’re in my office, I’ve still got those, that’s my working mapsthat I work from so for this meeting I though I’d have some much cleaner maps. Mr. Andolsekstated I have a question or comment I guess, zoning in my opinion is the biggest contributor ordetractor of property value so if something is zoned R-1 it is the most restricted use so the propertyvalues are the lowest and we you get into the 2’s of course the values of the use increases so bychanging zoning on people who own property that are already established you could punish themgreatly and I don’t know what the plan is if you’re going through and do an apprehensive changeon what is there but keep in mind if that happens I mean it could be detrimental to some and it canenhance others. If you sold a piece of property the way I look at it, to somebody for what the value972