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

Thibodaux Zoning Review 2010code inspections, they have to pass those same inspections as site built homes. Legally youcannot restrict a modular home from any neighborhood, it is like any single family housing butmobile and the manufactured homes you can restrict to certain areas. So again it is ourrecommendation to include those definitions in the zoning ordinance; also you may want to put anage limitation on the manufactured home at the time of application and you might want to specifythe location of the manufactured and mobile home. The long term recommendation is an overlayzone, what we found in the City of Pineville was that there were certain areas that mobile homesand manufactured homes were restricted to; however, they had to have certain design standards inthe rest of the neighborhood, so if it was a driveway, if it was skirting, the overlay zone requiredthem to maintain their structure in a certain manor and what we understood with the modularhomes was that there was some concern that modular homes were coming in on chassis so if thatis the case, then you can require design review for those homes as well, they would have to meetcertain standards before they could go in that neighborhood.Industrial zones, there was an issue, there were some businessmen looking to place industrialzones into the community and so locating those zones was an issue, where we could put thoseand what we found was under State laws, it appears that recycling, manufactured recyclingoperations was treated the same as solid waste, so that is something you may want the CityAttorney to look at, under Thibodaux’s ordinance the preliminary separation of non-hazardousrecyclables is located in M-1, but this is dependent or should be dependent on either the operationbeing entirely enclosed or the level of pollution that this business would actually generate. Thesize of the lot would also be a factor in where the location, you know where it would be located andthe ability to handle the truck movement going in and out and it probably should be situated on amajor highway or a major road, commercial thoroughfare. We recommend putting buffers there tolessen the impact of the pollution, the noise, the air, whatever pollution may come from it and tomake it perpetual we recommend that the property boundary be deeded or donated to the City, thebuffer remains open, like green space it could be made to look very aesthetically pleasing andblend in.Visibility at intersections, this was another issue that came up and the clarity as to how to make thisclear in the ordinance. The current method used is to pivot to the center of the intersection and tostrike an arc radius of 50 feet, the arc would determine what could be built or moved into toobstruct the motorists view, the area of non-obstruction is determined by the width of the street.Our recommendation is given the typical street width within the City of Thibodaux is to keep it at 50feet as the distance and instead of creating an arc, a straight line joining streets at point which isset at a distance of 50 feet from the intersection is optimal.The fencing regulation, we were told that property owners that were located in and R-3 with 10 ormore parking spaces have to have a setback of 20 feet and a 6 foot fence or screening enclosingthe parking; however in Section 602 of the ordinance it prohibits the fencing or the walls along thefront of the yard greater than 2 ½ feet so our recommendation is to preserve the aesthetic qualityof the neighborhood and to provide for public safety, so our recommendation is to permit fencingpossibly higher than 2 feet along the font of the property. What we found in the other comparablecities is that they allow at least 4 feet with the exception of those lots that are on the corner,provided that the property is set back 20 feet and not on a corner and again that is based on thefencing regulations of Hammond and Pineville which perhaps could work here as well.Abandoned cars were brought up as an issue, we were told that the ordinance allows for or dealswith abandoned cars on private property but not commercial. Typically abandoned vehicles is notan issue that is addressed in the zoning ordinance, so usually that is handled in your nuisancecodes and in all three comparable cities they had ordinances that addressed junk vehicles codes,so we recommend that the city create such ordinances to address those issues as well.The variance requirements, the staff advised us that there was some confusion with Section1003.1, subsection C & D, subsection C requires that the applicant seeking the variance prove thathe or she did not cause the problem for which the variance is needed. Subsection D is requiringthat the applicant prove that by approving the variance the Board is not giving the applicant specialtreatment, the burden is on the applicant to give that, to provide that proof and that is pretty muchstandard language.For off street parking we found that the number of patients at a successful local medical clinicexceeded the number of required parking spots. The administration would like to resolve the issuefor the future, they weren’t sure if this was going to be a trend, so they wanted to address thisbefore it becomes a problem. Medical clinic parking requirements for the City of Thibodaux is oneparking space for every 500 feet of floor area, for the City of Hammond it is one parking space forevery 250 square feet of building, for the City of Pineville it is 3 spaces for every doctor’s office plusone space for each examining room and for the City of Ruston it is one space for every 200 feet offloor area. Our recommendation and you could certainly use any of those models but it is difficultto determine by the success of one medical clinic that all the medical clinics in Thibodaux wouldneed to increase their parking, there are so many variables there that is in play, the type of doctorswithin the clinic, the number of doctors within the clinic, the location, the type of patients, if it is afree clinic or what have you. So increasing the parking space requirement could be too much for784