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

Thibodaux Zoning Review 2010she will go through a short power point, I think it is about 15 or 20 minutes and highlighting theaspects of our report and without any further adieu and holding up this process because I’m sureyou have other business to attend to. Mr. Breaud stated let me just ask, you’re going to go througha whole presentation, do you want comments or go through the presentation and come back oncomments on different items or how do you want to approach this? Mr. Belanger stated I think wecan take comments as we go through it, that way it is pertinent if someone has an issue. Ms.Caesar stated actually I think it would be best if we wait until after I complete the presentation sowe can speed through. Mr. Belanger replied right because we’ll dim the lights a little bit, that maybe a better approach. Mr. Breaud stated what we would like to do, we were only presented thisbooklet last night and I know nobody on this commission has had a chance to read the whole thingso what we would like to do is go ahead and do your presentation and we’ll come back and havediscussions on items but I would like for this to be presented back to the Commission to act onwhat recommended changes or modifications as they see fit. Mr. Belanger replied that is correctand if I may just to give the public and yourselves just a little insight as to how this process needsto take place, tonight we’re presenting it to you for your consideration and suggestions. We willthen probably within the next 30 days finalize that document with all of the bells and whistles thatwill be in it, there will be no more additional verbiage outside of the professional edits that we mayelect to take hearing the concerns that you have and then we will present that back to you as afinal form in which you will accept, reject parts, portions, all of it in its entirety or whatever as arecommendation to the full Council and then they will ultimately make a decision for acceptance ornot. So if we can we can dim the lights. Ms. Simone Caesar stated good evening everyone, I amthe lead planner on the Thibodaux Zoning review and that is this document right here - there areextra copies over in the corner there for anyone that would like to grab one. It is over 75 pages soI will not be presenting this whole document tonight but I will be highlighting basically the areas ofconcern that was brought to our attention and our findings and recommendations and then I willturn it back over to the Planning Commission to kind of move as they like, if they’d like to takecomments or not. Mr. Breaud then asked if everyone could see and hear, if they’d like to changechairs in order to see, feel free. Ms. Caesar stated back in October of 2009 the Council drafted aresolution, 1491 directing South Central Planning to conduct the Thibodaux Zoning Review. Oneof the biggest areas of concern for the zoning review was non-conforming uses, as we heard a littleof that tonight. Another issue was a moratorium that was called on modular homes but what wewill discuss a little later is that there seems to have been some confusion on the terminology ofmodular, mobile or manufactured homes. Other issues were placement of new activities inappropriate zoning districts, blighted properties, parking and conflicting interpretations. We used atwo prong approach for the methodology, citizen participation and comparative analysis, our staffinterviewed the Mayor, code enforcement staff, members of the Planning Commission, members ofthe Chamber of Commerce. We held a public meeting at the end of one of the PlanningCommission meetings and then we are here tonight presenting and to hear your comments. Weheld subsequent meetings with the administration staff and tonight what we have is the compileddraft of our findings and recommendation and will hear some of the comments back as to thingswe need to do editing to. We’ll complete the final draft and present it to the Planning Commissionand the Council for a hearing and it will go through that public hearing process. For ourcomparative analysis we chose three cities, Hammond, Pineville and Ruston and that is becausethey were similar in character to the City of Thibodaux. They were similar in size, economiccharacteristics, educational characteristic, all three were college towns so they seem like a goodmatch with the City of Thibodaux. Our findings are recommendations, our biggestrecommendation is that the City of Thibodaux should undertake a comprehensive planningprocess. What we found is that the zoning ordinance was 31 years old and so they are newchallenges as the gentleman was eluding to a little earlier, there are new challenges today, there isincreasing growth, need for housing, an increasing need for houses, those economic changes sothe demand for land for commercial and industrial businesses and there is a need to protect thecommunity from natural disasters that we’ve seen in these past few years. A comprehensive planwill take the City through an inventory process, we’ll inventory the existing land and what is hereand the land uses and through a citizen participation process we’ll determine the direction that theCity would like to go through, how we are growing, you know we’re a growing city so what directiondo you want to grow, how do you want to develop. One of the tools of a comprehensive plan, toimplement a comprehensive plan is zoning so once you’ve undertaken the comprehensiveplanning process then you should undertake a zoning update to go hand in hand with thatcomprehensive plan. As I said before it is an implementation tool for the planning and whateverplanner is selected the steps that they would take is develop recommended course of action forrevising the zoning ordinance, they’ll research and recommend appropriate language to unresolvedzoning issues and they’ll produce a final comprehensive zoning document which includes a map, azoning map as well. Another finding that we had was that the zoning review just did cursory,through this process we’ve done a cursory review of some of the issues here. As I sat down withinterview participants with a map, they identified several non-conforming uses and that is justsitting down with a map, that wasn’t actually going out and doing a detailed zoning study. Sothrough this exercise we’ve identified possibly two areas that need a zoning study, one is definitelynon-conforming uses the other one is possibly off street parking for medical clinics. The zoningstudies typically are called by the Council and they identify the target areas, they give the boundingstreets and identify the specific issues to be studied.582