The Nashville Town Council was scheduled to vote on a new Land Use Ordinance at its regularly scheduled meeting last week, but council members instead chose to take more time to review the document, which is approximately 250 pages in length and had recently been received.
Senior Planner Michael Harvey of InFocus, the consultant brought in to bring the town’s land use plan into compliance with current state law, said he would be in communication with the council members over the next 30 days on how to fine-tune the new ordinance to address the concerns of the council.
Following the meeting, Town Manager Randy Lansing said the biggest impact the new land use ordinance will have will be in the construction of new housing developments in the town. The new law will not affect land uses previously approved by the town. Those will be “grandfathered in,” Lansing said.
When Harvey returns before the council with a finished product, Lansing said, the town’s property owners stand to benefit the most by having a plan on the books that clearly states what their land can and cannot be used for as well as what would be the required elements of those intended uses.
Harvey said the revised plan would clearly list all the documentation that applicants will need to present to the planning board regarding all proposed projects.
Besides bringing the plan into compliance with current state regulations, Lansing said, the group which stands to benefit the most from the proposed ordinance will be applicants appearing before the town’s planning board.
“The main thing (the consultant) set out to do is create conditional zoning districts, manufactured housing, planned unit development, conditional zoning residential and conditional zoning non-residential,” Lansing noted. “Those were all created. We used to have 38 different special use permits in our ordinance. This (proposed land use plan) brings it down to less than a dozen. Those things that were special use permits now become conditional zoning.”
Lansing said when the ordinance is approved, a developer will be able to make a proposal, submit a site plan and follow the standards, then go before the council for review.
In opening remarks about the ordinance, Harvey told the council about the legislature’s laws regulating local governments’ land use ordinances. Harvey said the proposed land use plan will bring the town into compliance, and he credited the town’s staff for its work on the ordinance to make those laws enforceable.
“Their focus was to make sure the code met the minimum requirements of state law to be enforced properly,” Harvey told the council.
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