GREENFIELD — Officials in Greenfield are nearly finished with the first overhaul of the city’s development and zoning rules since the late 1990s.
Leaders say the update, now about two years in the making, realigns those rules with Greenfield’s goals while simplifying the processes and interpretations for those who need them.
Joanie Fitzwater, Greenfield zoning administrator, described zoning regulations as an implementation tool of the city’s comprehensive plan.
“It regulates your land use and tries to create on-the-ground goals that the community has put together in their comprehensive plan by creating rules and regulations of where certain uses can happen and the densities of those uses,” she said.
Jenna Wertman, the city’s senior planner, agreed.
“It sets out how you want those uses to interact with each other,” she said.
Greenfield hired Calfee, a Cincinnati-based consulting firm, more than two years ago to determine whether the city’s zoning rules promote the goals laid out in its comprehensive plan.
“It was pretty interesting to find that many of them were outdated and archaic and were not really addressing the things that we wanted to deal with today, like becoming more walkable and mixed use,” Fitzwater said.
Calfee also steered the city toward what’s called heritage-based zoning, which Fitzwater said aims to create districts geared toward what’s already on the ground and foster development in the same vein as existing uses and architectural standards.
One example, Fitzwater said, is the city’s traditional neighborhood district, which can be found along U.S. 40 and State Street. Both are areas of town with houses that are starting to convert into businesses. Rules need to be sensitive to existing architecture in those areas as new uses emerge, Fitzwater said.
Downtown is another example, Wertman added. It’s currently zoned general business, which means a new building going up would have to follow larger setback rules that would render it out of place among the structures already there. Proposed changes would make downtown its own district with its own rules.
Officials have updated, reorganized and combined two chapters of city code — one governing subdivisions and the other zoning — into one document called a unified development ordinance spanning more than 200 pages.
The proposed ordinance is easier to navigate than it’s text-heavy predecessors, Wertman said.
When people visit the Planning Department in City Hall, she continued, they often have a specific idea in mind, but don’t know where they can do it. The new ordinance has a large table with a multitude of uses spelling out where they’re permitted and where they would require certain approvals, like from the city’s board of zoning appeals.
Visitors also often come in saying they own a property in a certain zone and don’t know what they can do there, Wertman said. The new ordinance will allow them to flip to a chapter specifically about that zone filled with maps, photos depicting what those areas already look like, tables of development standards and other information.
When visiting the ordinance online, readers will be able to navigate the information they need quickly by clicking links taking them to parts that pertain to the subject they’re researching, Fitzwater said.
The Greenfield Advisory Plan Commission will hold a public hearing on the proposed update Dec. 9. The commission will eventually vote on the changes, which will also require three readings from Greenfield City Council.
“We know there will be bugs, because you have to test and try it,” Fitzwater said. “So we’ll be doing a lot of that in 2020. But all in all, we think the city will be much better off and poised for development now that we got this under our belts.”
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WHAT: Greenfield Advisory Plan Commission Public Hearing
WHEN: 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 9
WHERE: Greenfield City Hall, 10 S. State St., Greenfield
WHY: The plan commission is considering updated and reorganized development and zoning rules.
Read the proposed update at greenfieldin.org or at the Planning Department in City Hall, 10 S. State St., Greenfield, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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