News

City manager serves up menu of growth ideas

By Bill Moss, Published: January 19, 2017

Hendersonville City Manager John Connet on Monday presented the Planning Board with an overview of planning projects, redevelopment concepts and growth strategies for 2017 and beyond.

Connet’s proposed agenda for the planners included updating the city’s zoning code, making the Historic Seventh Avenue District an Urban Redevelopment Area and potentially withdrawing city zoning control from a one-mile perimeter beyond its borders.
On affordable housing, Connet said there are things the city can do through land-use planning to encourage higher density housing.
“The question for the Planning Board is are we happy with larger developments or do we want to incentivize people’s ability to build duplexes, to build triplexes,” he said. “Are there some things we can do to provide attractive housing close to downtown. What do we need to be doing?”
Planning Board members cited two recent cases where the City Council had rejected multi-family rezoning requests that the Planning Board had endorsed.
“We have to fight the misconception that (higher density development) is going to be a low-rent kind of deal and people don’t want that in their back yard,” board member Jay Thorndike said.
Connet was forthright in laying out options, telling the planners at one point that the city staff could identify potential tracts for higher density development and seek zoning to permit it.
“That creates work and it may backfire on me,” he said.
Connet and city Zoning Administrator Susan Frady acknowledged that inconsistencies and confusion in city codes often frustrate landowners seeking development permits.
“We just want to have a clean ordinance,” Frady said. “With the zoning ordinance and the special use section, it needs to flow where somebody can look at it and know what the requirements are without having us sit with them three or four times to show them.”
Planning Board members also recalled times when the city rules seemed inconsistent when it comes to landscaping.
“I seem to recall trees” in renderings of the new Health Sciences Center, Jon Blatt said. “There’s not a single tree on that project. How did that come to pass?”
Steve Johnson responded: “And you’ve got the opposite problem. The Fresh Market parking lot is almost overlandscaped and it’s almost dangerous to try to maneuver in that parking lot because of all the landscaping.
Stormwater rules are partly to blame. “One way you can meet stormwater regulations is to use rainwater and do rain gardens (to filter runoff) and that’s what they’ve chosen to do,” Connet said.
City planners have also been trying to identify regulations that cause developers an expensive and time-consuming pass through City Council approval. One example is minor variances to previously issued zoning permits.
“It’s hard to say what’s a no brainer but maybe we could give some leeway that this is something that just comes back to the Planning Board and the Planning Board says we approve it,” he said. “This is just a de minimis change.”
Many of the ideas have been in discussion at the staff level for a year, Connet said, and they’ll take more time to study and move forward.
“It’s going to take some time but we want to do it right,” he said.