People are talking about the Melton Hill Lake waterfront and proposed marina redevelopment. As I noted earlier, there’s a public meeting about the marina next Wednesday evening (October 29). For those who haven’t seen it in print, the Oak Ridge Observer put the highlights of the R&R proposal on the web in a convenient format.
There are things to like about the R&R proposal (I particularly like the roundabout proposed to calm traffic and add aesthetic value at the intersection of Emory Valley Road and Melton Lake Drive), but jaws are dropping over the prospective developer’s request for 99-year rent-free lease. That’s something I can’t possibly support. Also, I’ve heard from people who have specific objections to some of the building that R&R is proposing. I assume that this far-reaching proposal was put forth not as a realiistic proposal, but rather as a starting point for discussion and negotiation.
The other proposal — from an experienced marina operator — was a modest one for installation of new boat docks in the boat basin. I have a hunch that the experienced marina operator has a pretty good idea what the market will truly support.
I expect some lively public discussion on this!
Here’s a slightly edited version of an announcement from City staff:
THE CITY OF OAK RIDGE STAFF HAS BEEN WORKING ON A MELTON LAKE WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT PLAN. AS PART OF THE STUDY THEY WOULD LIKE TO GATHER PUBLIC INPUT REGARDING THE LAKEFRONT DEVELOPMENT.
AS PART OF THE STUDY, THE OAK RIDGE MUNICIPAL PLANNING COMMISSION WOULD LIKE TO MEET WITH THE PUBLIC AT A PUBLIC FORUM AS SCHEDULED:
MELTON LAKE WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT
PUBLIC FORUM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2008
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
OAK RIDGE CIVIC CENTER, Rooms A & B
For more information, please contact the Community Development Department at 865-425-3531.
While election-watchers are (understandably) focused on the presidential election, the Oak Ridge ballot for November 2008 also includes the election of a 7-member City Charter Commission. It goes without saying that this is of great interest to city officials (both elected officials and city staff), and I’ve discussed the charter commission election with some of the candidates and with local-government watchers in the community, but I don’t think the public at large is paying much attention.
Fortunately, last week the Oak Ridge Observer published a complete set of candidate profiles, the Oak Ridger published its own set this week in two parts (here and here), and on Tuesday evening, October 14th, there was a League of Women Voters Candidates Forum for charter commission candidates in the new OR High School Amphitheater (an excellent venue, by the way!).
This election was initiated by a successful petition calling for a charter commission to consider adding district representation to the City Council. Currently all members are elected at large, and the petition proposes consideration of a hybrid arrangement, including some members elected at large and some elected by district. The petition brought about an election for a 7-member charter commission to study the charter and make recommendations for amendments. Any amendments that the commission recommends would be presented the voters in a referendum during the August 2008 election.
This process is giving me a sense of deja vu, for more than one reason.
First, I see this as rehashing a conversation that the community should have had several years ago. We last elected a charter commission back in 2003. That group discussed district representation, but did not give it particularly serious consideration, largely because the charter commissioners elected that year had been promoted to the voters as people who would not make substantial changes to the charter (they defeated other candidates who had called for radical changes in city government).
Second, this is shaping up as yet another one of those peculiar Oak Ridge political situations in which sharp battle lines are being drawn over a matter that reasonable people ought to be able to discuss thoughtfully and amicably. There are 7 candidates aligned with the original petitioners (see Citizens for District and At-Large Representation (CDAR) website for this list) and 10 who say they oppose district representation (see “Oak Ridge is One Neighborhood” (ORION) website for this list). The candidates are all responsible citizens with a variety of relevant civic experience, and I hope anyone who is elected will be open-minded about considering the pros and cons of various arrangements. Several have promised to do so, but not all. At the LWV forum one of the ORION candidates even said that his mind is so closed that he would vote to adjourn the commission at its first meeting. It is particularly paradoxical that the ORION faction claims to be all about community unity, but some of its candidates and supporters are making sweeping negative statements disparaging the motives of fellow citizens who are asking for district representation.
Another source of deja vu is that in some ways this is looking like a reprise of the 2007 referendum about city money for the proposed Crestpointe shopping center. Some of the 7 CDAR candidates were prominently involved in opposing Crestpointe, while several of the 10 ORION candidates were prominently involved in supporting the proposal. This split probably reflects the fact that Oak Ridge’s pro-development community does well with at-large elections — I believe that this is true because it takes a lot more money to be a competitive candidate citywide than it does in a single district (where “shoe leather” campaigning is more likely to be effective), so large donations can make a bigger difference in at-large elections. However, a principal concern of the petitioners was that the northeastern part of the city is essentially unrepresented under the current at-large arrangement. Fully 40% of the population lives north of Oak Ridge Turnpike and east of Louisiana Avenue, but according to CDAR none of the 11 people elected to City Council in the last 5 election cycles have come from this sector of the city. Meanwhile, 4 of the 7 current Council members live in the southeastern section of the city, which was home to a little more than one-quarter of the city population as of the 2000 Census. Oak Ridge may be fairly small in population, but the city is spread out geographically, and I’ve seen that people’s experiences and perceptions of living here can differ tremendously depending on where they live.
I hope that whoever gets elected will at least be wiling to be open-minded in discussing the possibility of district representation. There definitely are some negatives to the concept, and there may be other effective ways to improve city government’s responsiveness to all citizens (at the LWV forum candidate Paula Flowers, one of the ORION candidates, said that there are other things that could be done, but she did not get a chance to elaborate on her ideas), but it’s disturbing to hear some candidates asserting upfront that district representation is so absolutely out of the question that it should not even be seriously evaluated, much less presented to the voters.
Monday evening, October 6, City Council has a special meeting to decide whether to pledge $500,000 to the expansion of the Roane State Community College branch campus in Oak Ridge.
Details of square footage are a bit confusing, but it seems that Roane State wants to add a new 53,000 square foot building for health occupations and add 22,000 square feet of space to the existing building, including adding a second story to the library. This would increase the size of the campus by 62%. The college says this is needed to accommodate high enrollments and meet community needs in the areas of healthcare and nanotechnology occupations. The college wants to gather $5 million in pledges (about 15% of the total project cost) in order to get the state to add this project to its priority list for higher education projects — and eventually commit to paying the rest of the project cost. Anderson County has already pledged $500,000.
As Monday’s Oak Ridger reports, funding the request would add about 1/2 cent to the City tax rate because the money could be obtained through borrowing. Roane State is important to the community (for students, their future employers and future medical patients, ORICL partiicipants, and the jobs the school provides), and that’s not a big addition to the tax rate. I hope that area residents are enthusiastic enough to make generous pledges from their personal and business resources. I have serious doubts, however, about whether City Council should pledge to spend “other people’s money” (city taxpayer dollars) on a state project when there are significant unmet capital needs in areas that are the city’s responsibility. (To name a few of these, the city preschool is in a building that was thought of as “too old” long before the Roane State campus was built, the municipal building needs significant work, and the city has been chronically unable to address needs for a senior center.)
Just as I am uncomfortable with “spot zoning,” I am not comfortable with the “spot budgeting” that this request represents — I’d like to consider this proposed capital expenditure alongside other city priorities.
Also, I wonder about alternative ways to address Roane State’s needs. The Roane State Oak Ridge campus is abuzz with activity in the morning but gets real quiet in the afternoon — couldn’t some enrollment growth be handled by adding more classes in the afternoon? Oak Ridge just completed a new state of the art high school, and it is not at capacity — couldn’t some Roane State classes (particularly dual enrollment classes) be held there? The Roane State proposal is ambitiously large — what could be accomplished with a smaller expansion (say, just a new health building), and what would it cost to do that?
Update: At the October 6th meeting, Council voted unanimously to refer the request to the budget and finance committee for consideration during our study of the entire budget for FY 2010 and beyond. Also, we learned that Roane State’s capacity issue in Oak Ridge is mainly related to the health occupations courses (such as nursing and dental hygiene), which are having to turn away many of the qualified students who apply to enroll due to lack of facilities (such as dental chairs needed for training future dental hygienists) for additional students.
People who read an article in last Monday’s Oak Ridger have been asking me “what’s this about the height of houses?”
Since the article apparently was confusing, I’ll try to provide the whole story here.
The city planning staff presented a comprehensive revision of the city’s zoning ordinance for residential districts. After being passed by the Planning Commission, it went to City Council for two “readings” in August and September. The proposal is on the city website as a .doc file and in the PDF version of the City Council agenda.
One major theme of the changes was to relax restrictions on house size, setbacks, etc., to make the zoning ordinance more friendly to developers of new subdivisions. However, the same zoning regulations that apply in new subdivisions also apply in existing neighborhoods — and zoning rules are one of the things that people rely on to help ensure that a homeowner’s neighbors won’t make changes that harm the value of their own properties.
In reviewing the proposal, I kept asking myself (and staff) “How will this affect existing established neighborhoods?” I was thinking, if a house burns down and is replaced, or if a long-vacant lot is finally developed, will new (bigger) houses adversely affect the neighbors’ quality or life or reduce the value of existing homes? This is not purely hypothetical — disruption of neighborhoods by “mansionization” (building of homes on a much larger scale than the rest of the neighborhood) has become a big issue in some other parts of the country. I figure it’s better to avoid conflict by not relaxing standards in the first place than to try to fix neighborhoods later on after they’ve been disrupted.
Staff convinced me that most of the proposed changes would not be detrimental to established neighborhoods. They pointed out that a new larger home up the street tends to raise the value of the other homes on the street, not reduce them. Also, the changes in setback distances were mostly modest reductions in Oak Ridge’s generous rear-yard setbacks, and they would not noticeably diminish most people’s privacy.
However, I was not convinced about the proposed change in the maximum height of a house in single-family residential zones — from 35 ft to 40 ft. According to staff, taller houses are needed because ceilings are higher than they used to be, multi-story houses need space between floors for HVAC ducts, etc., and steeply pitched roofs are now in fashion. In a typical Oak Ridge neighborhood of one-story homes, I think the addition of a 40-ft-tall house (this is the typical height of a 3-story or 3-1/2-story commercial building) would be very disruptive. (Thirty-five feet also could be “too tall,” but that rule was already in place.)
I asked about making the new rules apply only to newly platted areas, but was told that couldn’t be done — zoning regulations must be uniform across the district. That’s when I started wondering whether the new height limit is truly needed. I asked my sister (a residential architect in Colorado) to help me understand the need for taller houses, and to my surprise she told me that all the jurisdictions she works in (places like Aspen, Colorado) are more restrictive than our current ordinance. With that info, and after searching Google for height limits in other cities and counties, I concluded that the 35-foot height limit should not be a problem for new development. Few jurisdictions that have height limits in feet for single-family residential zones set the limit any higher than 35 feet, and some have more restrictive limits. The 35-ft limit (measured from the ground to the midpoint of the rooflines) is ample to allow a 3-story building (or a 2-story building with a full walk-out basement). Additionally, I figured that property owners in R-1 zones should be able to seek variances for steep lots on which the 35-ft limit would pose a special hardship.
After all that, at the Sept. 22 Council meeting I proposed to amend the new zoning ordinance to change the “Maximum Height in Feet” for the R-1-A, R-1-B, and R-1-C zoning districts from 40 feet to 35 feet. My amendment failed by a 4-3 vote (Tom Hayes and Dave Mosby agreed with me, but Charlie Hensley spoke out regarding the need to accommodate 3-story houses with steep-pitched peaked roofs, and the other Council members apparently agreed with Charlie). However, Council voted unanimously to ask the Planning Commission to look into measures to ensure that existing neighborhoods are protected with respect to height limits.
