Public participation is the key

16 years ago

    Time for a Quarterly update from the Planning and Development Department. My first six months on the City Planner job have gone by quickly. My cross country skis are warm – weather waxed and put away, and I have been out and about on my new (used!) road bike from Mel’s.  With the change in seasons I have been able to meet many more volunteers and concerned citizens involved with land use decision making in the City, and I have been learning a great deal from these discussions.
    In our previous “In the City” column in April, I described two out of four key areas of the City Planner job description: my work on behalf of the Presque Isle Downtown Revitalization Committee (PIDRC) and the important business of grant writing. In this article I will cover the other half of the position, namely, my duties as staff to the Planning Board and the process of making zoning amendments and other changes to the Land Use and Development Code.
    In serving the Planning Board, staff’s job is to provide the decision-makers with quality tools and information to help them to make decisions that are in the best interests of the City. Nothing is decided at staff level. However, by ensuring a high level of public participation, researching the legal requirements and recommendations from state agencies and responding to questions from the Planning Board and the public, staff has an opportunity to shape the dialogue so that it will be as productive as possible, and will hopefully lead to a result that is satisfactory to as many people as possible. Whether they perceive that a particular decision benefits them or works against their own personal interests, concerned citizens have a right to know that that an appropriate process was followed to form that decision.
    To give an example, the Planning Board recently recommended to the City Council an amendment to the Rural Residential Zone (RRZ) intended to protect and enhance water quality at Echo Lake, by introducing new limits to the density of future development there. The proposed zoning amendment balances the community’s desire to continue the trend of former part-time “camp” structures on small lots being converted into full-time dwellings against other equally important concerns in the community that home renovations and especially the creation of new lots pose a threat to the natural resources everyone in the community enjoys. So, how to strike that balance? Needless to say, reasonable people can disagree on how best to accomplish this goal.
    Staff reached out to the community with an aggressive public notice campaign and scheduled multiple workshop meetings prior to the public hearing. The Echo Lake Association should be commended for providing a forum for consensus building and for doing so in a way that encouraged everyone to have their say, whether they were members of the Association or not. That is the essence of community-based planning. Additionally the Planning Board provided ample time for a full and frank airing of opinions at the public hearing itself. The result? The RRZ amendment as recommended by the Planning Board preserves the minimum of 15 foot side setbacks, but increases the minimum lot size and road frontage requirements for new lots to the same dimensions as the surrounding Agricultural Farming Zone.
    The City Council will make a final decision on the proposed changes after two additional public hearings at 6:00 PM on September 3rd and October 4th. In the meantime, copies of the changes recommended by the Planning Board to the language and the Zoning Map for the Echo Lake RRZ are available at the City Clerk’s office for public inspection. This is all a part of the legal requirements by statute in Maine to ensure appropriate public participation in making amendments to the City’s Land Use and Development Code.
    The other function of the Planning Board is in the review of specific applications to develop property in the City. This spring and summer to date Planning Board has approved a commercial subdivision including a 93 room hotel located at 768 Main Street and a residential subdivision consisting of 7 Townhouses and 4 Duplex units at the end of Oak Street on the bike path. While these applications focus the Planning Board’s attention on individual parcels instead of the broader requirements of an entire zone, one key part of the process is the same, and that is that more public participation is better than less. For this reason, public hearings are required for subdivision applications as they are for several other types of land use decision-making in the City, and the Planning Board benefits from having this input. Again, this is not due merely to legal requirements. It is due in part to the guiding principle of professional town planners everywhere, which is that input from public is the key ingredient in any planning or zoning process, to ensure a quality result.
    In the case of the hotel project, we received first hand accounts of the status of traffic issues of today, and this information impacted the final design of the access / egress configuration which has required an exchange of reciprocal easements with the neighboring credit union parcel and extensive correspondence with the Maine Department of Transportation. Likewise, the public comments received from users of the bike path adjacent to the new “Cunningham Heights” residential subdivision mentioned above led to extra scrutiny by the Planning Board of the developer’s proposal for vegetative screening. By challenging the Planning Board and staff to respond in this way to your questions and concerns, members of the public can and should pitch in to ensure the quality of land use decision-making in the City.
    James P. Francomano is city planner with the Department of Planning and Development for the city of Presque Isle. He can be reached at 764-2504 or e-mail to jfrancomano@presqueisleme.us