City Council - Regular Meeting

good afternoon. Thank y'all for your time. Um, like Brian said, we've been working with the, with staff and, uh, more recently with planning commission on the, uh, the draft zoning ordinance update. Um, which Lee, I think we were hired maybe like four years ago. Um, there was a big period of time between then and we actually started, um, but, um, had been working on it pretty consistently for two and a half years and, have incorporated literally thousands of comments that staff has given us and then additional one staff has made that planning commission has given them. And so that's kind of where we are today. This ordinance is really, it's not what people think of as a, I'm sorry, I'm Bill Wright. I'm the director of coding at Town Planning and Urban Design Collaborative. And this is Anna Blevins, and she's a planner and coding expert in her own right. And I forgot everybody didn't already know us. We've been around a while. This code, this zoning ordinance, is required. is a type of ordinance that is referred to as a form-based ordinance. It has a hybrid quality to it in that it has a lot of conventional provisions in it as well that were brought forward from the existing ordinance. And a form-based ordinance is really, or we call it character-based interchangeably, is really focused not only on use, which old conventional codes were always just focused on uses, but also on the character or the form of the resulting development. So it's written with an intentional effort to make a place that is a place that somebody walks into and they go, okay, this feels like Gallatin and it really feels good. So there are a number of... of different elements that make that happen, but what we did originally was come to Gallatin and study the DNA of each of the various areas that people identified as like, here's one of our good areas, and took that DNA and embedded it into the regulations. I'm not gonna give y'all any more dissertation on form-based coding, I just wanted to, I didn't know exactly where to start, how much all y'all already knew, Um, and I'm, and I may be tracking over some, uh, things here, particularly with the planning commissioners, uh, that they've heard before. But, um, I thought we ought to probably start at this point, uh, for the city council. That's just our team. We don't need to reintroduce them. And we, um, like Brian said, we're, we're at the adoption draft stage. Um, So this is the draft document if you see it lying on somebody's desk or if you've looked online at the documents that the documents have been made available to you. One of the things I always encourage somebody to do before they start trying to wade their way through a zoning ordinance is to just sit down with the table of contents for a second and actually just understand the way that it's laid out. Your ordinance is laid out very topically. Once you get through the general part and that you have to have a zoning map and basic stuff like that, it runs through topics in a way that makes each of the uh... articles actually a lot smaller than they would be uh... we do some some some places uh... elect to go another route which is you do one four or more hundred-page document, and it's only got four or five articles in it, which makes your articles about like this. But I won't run through all these. You guys can look at it. You'll see some familiar topics that are within the conventional document that exists right now. But we're going to run through each of the articles just very briefly, kind of give you an idea of what's there. the first articles, what I call the housekeeping article, it, um, it has general provisions in it that are some of them required to sort of set up a legal document in the first place. It tells you the, you know, uh, what, what authority it was, uh, enacted under, um, et cetera. It's the intent of the document, how this document relates to other documents, um, and, and other provisions, um, non-conforming uses and we've had a number of discussions about non-conforming uses and what sorts of things can trigger the loss of a legal non-conforming use and how people need to act in order to keep their legal non-conforming use. And non-conforming use is just, it was legal under the old ordinance and it might not satisfy a regulation that's under this new ordinance. And it's a concept that's embedded in the Tennessee state statutes and the provisions that are in this document track the Tennessee state statute, but there are some exceptions that have been carved out based on discussions we've had with the Planning Commission. Transition rules, just like what if somebody has submitted a document that complied with the old ordinance, but it hasn't gotten approved by the time the new ordinance came into effect, what happens? Vested property rights. Again, there's a Tennessee state statute that this tracks. Some states don't have a statute that tracks vested property rights, but this one does. This Tennessee does, and this ordinance follows it. And then provisions about performance guarantees, like if a developer is required to put in whatever kind of infrastructure, and if they fail to do it, what happens? And so that's the... It's a way that the city can protect itself. It's very similar to the performance bond or the performance guarantee procedure in subdivision regulations where somebody, you know, you've got to put down the top coat of the road and then you've got to put down the final coat of the road within certain periods of time, that sort of thing. I spent too much time on that section. I already know. So we'll try to pick it up a little bit. Article 2, the zoning map. Is that you? This is me. Okay. Well, I always think about Anna when I think about zoning maps because she's the queen of the zoning map. She is the person who always puts them together and understands inside and out. But this article, it incorporates the... the zoning map by reference. It says who maintains it, how it's maintained. There's some provisions for things that are called special requirements in it. And if, for instance, there's a zoning district that might not allow but one story, for instance, I'm looking down to the two story one. Um, but it says that a special requirement set might say on this piece of this block, you can have two stories, um, or you gotta have two stories. And that's the sort of the way that, that that works. Um, but a number of special requirements and other special requirements can be added, um, by amendment to, uh, this document, just like any other, uh, uh, amendment to the zoning ordinance. And there's a, uh, provision, a specific provision on newly annexed properties. And they, uh, get assigned to, um, you haven't, I haven't told you about, uh, character districts yet, but CD is character district. Um, and, uh, there's one of the character districts that if somebody, uh, brings in, uh, a new piece of property annex is in, that that is the district that it will fall into until they get a map amendment to actually map it the way they want to develop it. Is this still me? Yes. Okay. Okay.

I'm a little bit shorter than Bill. Okay, so getting into Article 3, this is where your zoning districts are established. So this covers your base districts, your overlay districts, and then talks about existing planned districts, which essentially are any... area that is under a master plan that had already been approved and it's vested and it's basically frozen in time. So that's an EPD, but I can also let staff elaborate on that further if they need to later. I'm going to very quickly go through your zoning districts, just so you're familiar with them. But as Bill said, we call them character districts because character is the main thing that we're focusing on with this document and for Gallatin in the future. So shorthand, they're CDs. And then there's also SDs, or special districts. But they kind of range from a spectrum of the most rural to the most urban. So if you're starting with the most rural, that's CD1. So this is your natural land, typically isn't developed. Then as you move up, CD2A is more agricultural, and then you might have some minimal residential development in there as well. Then CD2 is not as much ag, but it is low density, single family residential. CD3L is neighborhood large lot. So this is also just primarily single family residential, but you kind of start to have more blocks and it's a little more formal, but the lots are still pretty big and the setbacks are pretty deep. Then CD3 is just your typical neighborhood general. So very similar to 3L, but the lots get a little bit smaller. The houses are a little bit closer to each other and they get a little bit closer to the street. CD4 is neighborhood center, so this is where you start to get kind of a mix of uses and an interesting place. So you have some overlap with, I think, single family is still allowed in this district, but then you get maybe some townhomes and some small multifamily apartment buildings and live-work buildings, commercial buildings. That kind of thing. And so it's a little bit more interesting. Buildings are going to be closer together, but probably not touching because I think that you still have some side setbacks, but they're going to be closer to the street as well. CD4A is kind of a funkier version of CD4. So we were calling this neighborhood artisan. It allows for a little bit more than CD4 as far as like maker spaces or some light industrial, but still creates a place. So I think right now we have this in kind of the, is it Depot Square area? So we thought that could be something cool, but that's CD4A. CD4C is neighborhood corridor. So this is what you would mostly think of as your big box areas, especially along like Nashville Highway. But the idea is that we're kind of trying to make more of a place than they currently are. So you start to see, like you can see in this rendering, the buildings in the back are big box, but then to kind of cover the large amounts of parking that are there, they're concealed with buildings. So it kind of creates more urbanism and maybe more pedestrian friendly area, but still, you know, very much accommodates the car. And then CD5 is the most urban area for Gallatin. This is essentially your downtown. So the buildings get a little bit taller. Setbacks may be zero because the buildings are touching. They're really close to the street. And then it's a pretty tight network of blocks. Uh, CDCV is civic. So this is mostly for civic purposes and then community facilities uses that you'll see. I'll touch on later when we get to the uses article. Now getting into special districts, this is SDLIV or light industrial village. So kind of a mix between your typical light industrial, but also incorporates a mix of uses. So it's more villagey, maybe some workforce housing, people that live close to where they work. So you're kind of minimizing the traffic and creating a place there as well. And then lastly, these two are pretty straightforward from like pulled out from your current ordinance. You've got restricted industrial and heavy industrial. And as far as overlays go, your historic district is pretty, again, from your existing ordinance. Same with floodplain and airport. I believe Brian Rose did some updates to the floodplain. One interesting one that we introduced is the idea of a rural conservation overlay. So this is essentially a conservation subdivision. And this idea came up, especially when we were talking during the Planet Beluza with the public engagement a couple years ago, that people really wanted to keep the rural character of Gallatin where they still could. So with a rural conservation overlay, the idea is that 50% of the area has to be either CD1 or 2A, so natural or agriculture. And then everything else is a mix of rural, neighborhood, kind of single family and then mixed use. So the idea is that you're kind of clustering and then protecting areas as well. Getting into Article 4, this is kind of the meat of the document. It's really important to get to know this section or this article. We call these, as a shorthand, the multi-page tables. So each district that I just went through has its own set of multi-page tables. It's about 10 pages. But the idea is that you have this kind of quick hand reference of tables. If I have a property in CD3, what can I do in CD3? All of these topics are covered. You've got lot standards, setbacks, facade standards, so what the building looks like at the front, frontage types that are allowed, building types, civic space, parking, non-building components, which are just kind of random things, landscaping, and then street screens and buffers. So just kind of running through an example of one, this is CD4, but you can see density is discussed, lot occupation, so this is like lot width, lot area, where the frontage has to be, where the entrance of the building has to be, setbacks, a quick reference to what frontage types are allowed, building types, architectural standards, roof pipe, roof pitch, all the things. Where buildings can, or sorry, where parking can go on the lot, that's also discussed here. Loading and access, non-building components, as I mentioned, and then landscaping. So now I'll turn it over to Bill.

One of the things... That's okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. One of the things you may have noticed when Adam was running those tables is your existing ordinance is predominantly textual. It's just paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of text. One of the big ideas in form-based or character-based ordinance drafting is that the information is presented in a way that's easier to digest than reading complete legalese paragraphs. I appreciate legalese. I practice law for a long time and I can read it, but there are not a whole lot of people that just love to sit down and read paragraphs this long with no periods, only semicolons until you get to the end. So the tables themselves are a good example of that. A lot of that information under a conventional code is just tedious packed words and things that leave people's heads spinning. moving on to article 5 is the density provision density is only applied to as opposed to each lot it's applied to a development site and there's a table and it tells you the density per gross site area of the district Uh, layers is a concept that people struggle with a little bit. They're just not familiar with. It's really an easy, um, an easy idea once you understand it. Um, it, it basically says where on a lot can I either place a particular thing or, or where can a use a particular use occur? And it's in, so it takes a lot and it divides it like a layer cake. having a, um, in the first layer is just from the, from the curb back to the frontage of the building. Um, and second layer is the next 20 feet from there. And then the third layer is everything from the back of the second layer all the way to the back lot line. Um, but you'll, when you're, when you're reading the document, you'll see things every now and then there'll be references to a layer and that's, that's what it's about. This illustration is actually right out of the document. Um, and I think it's in the definitions, right? Private frontage types. One of the most important things that's in the document are different types of private frontages. And when we talk about a private frontage, it's the facade and everything up to the curb. before you get into the vehicular lanes and it's really important because the way we perceive a place that we're in and so there are a number of permitted private frontage types in the document and the ones that are permitted vary by what character district you're in, most of the standards are going to vary by what character district you're in because the idea of character-based ordinances is to regulate according to the context of the place instead of having just one size fits everything because when you do one size fits everything, everything looks alike. And so that's the idea. And like Anna said, the character districts run from most rural to most urban. And so the standards that are the private frontages that are allowed in the most urban areas are the things that are the most urban. Um, and then when you go all the way back to the, to not only back to rural, because that's, uh, rural is rural and there's hardly anything built there. But, um, but when you start moving into like the single family districts, uh, those, um, as those get more urban, the types that are allowed in them get more urban as well. Same thing goes for building types. There are a number of building types that are regulated in the document. They run all the way from a single family house all the way up to the finest civic building. Again, they're laid out by context and then there's standards within each one of the, within each of the building types that regulate the type. You were supposed to be in all this. I went one too long.

I might just take this.

Good job.

It's a lot easier. One thing that I want to mention before talking about Article 9 is that and I should mention this with Article 4, with those multi-page tables that I went through, you may notice too that they're organized topically. And the order that those sections are in is the same order that the rest of the articles are in. So if you open a multi-page table, the first thing you see is density. And then Article 5 was density. And then the next section is lot occupation. Article 6 is lot occupation. Article seven is private frontages. Those are mentioned next. And then it just goes on and on. So for article nine, this is where your uses are. From what I remember, there was no table in your existing ordinance. Is that right? No uses table. So now you have one. Hopefully it's a lot easier to understand. But it has its own article because there are a lot of things attached to those uses. So this article includes principal uses, which is the main use on the lot. accessory uses and temporary uses and the permissions that you see within them are permitted by right. So it's just, it's permitted. You're good permitted with conditions, which is kind of just like some extra requirements on top of it. But once you meet those, you're fine. And then permitted by conditional use permit is you have to go to BZA and then not permitted per existing EPD. So those EPDs that we talked about earlier and then not regulated. But there's quite a few. If you see one that has permitted with conditions in it, that means that a few pages later, those conditions are listed out. And same with permitted by conditional use permit.

So there's an article that regulates street types and internal drives and just generally circulation within a block and outside of a lot and within the lot, and they're all gathered under this Article 10. They're, again, street types, street types according to context. Is it a road, the very first one, very rural type? doesn't have curbs on it it's just it's just a rural road and as you move up to the higher character districts the the um the cross sections of the road end up being much more um complex than the rural road the the most contra uh probably the most uh complex being the multi-way boulevard and it's um those are all described they talk it The provisions below the drawing, the drawings there for help and then the little bullets that are on them take you to a particular place in the table. Some of them talk about how wide the sidewalk needs to be, how wide the vehicular lanes are, how wide a parking lane is and that sort of thing. Super easy way to be able to just eyeball the requirements of street types. Parking requirements, these are not where the parking goes. This is more how many places per a particular use are required. Again, it's laid out in tabular form with the idea that that's a lot quicker read for most people than reading the paragraphs. There are provisions about how big parking spaces have to be, how parking areas and parking lots are designed. including cross-reference I think over to landscape provisions that would be applicable in a parking lot. the drive-through standards, how many spaces have to be available for cars to be stacked, as they call it, at a drive-through, their parking, bicycle parking standards, loading space requirements, and then just because it hardly goes anywhere else, it's where you put the trash and how it's treated. Where on the lot do you want it? Do you want it in front of the building? Probably not. You probably want it in the back of the building and that sort of thing. So continuing the theme, civic spaces are regulated and it's different from the way most conventional codes have dealt with it in the past, which was just to say you've got to have a certain amount of open space. And what happened under those conventional provisions typically was you got the open space and most of it was the undesirable part of the property. And so the idea of having civic spaces and having standards for civic spaces is that they're honest-to-goodness places where people want to be and can be used for recreation, whether it's passive recreation or active recreation or... You know, is it just a place where people like to hang out or that sort of thing? Again, they go from most rural to most urban. There are certain types of civic spaces that are very urban, like a plaza that has a paved open space in it. That's a very urban approach. The most rural being a natural area that is, you know, basically for unplanned and unstructured recreation. There's an article on landscape. There's a minimum landscape surface area requirement. There are provisions about overall required plantings and what types of plantings that are required. There is a list of native plant species so that you don't end up with things that are either invasive or don't fit the environment here. I'm going to tell you about the public frontage. I talked about the private frontage. The public frontage is actually regulated as part of the street. And the public frontage is everything from the back of the curb to the back of the curb across the street. So it's the sidewalk and the street trees and the... all of those elements that are pedestrian-oriented, and then it's also everywhere where the cars go. That's public frontage. And it also talks about size of landscape materials and how they should be placed as far as, like, particularly on the public frontage, are they... one street tree per block, that wouldn't work very well. They wouldn't be street trees. Or are they own center 40 or 50 feet so that there's a regular placement of them going along an urban area. Most rural places don't have street trees. They just have their own trees, so. Um, there's a provision that, um, I mean, an article that covers fences and walls and screening and street screens and buffers. Um, there are three types of buffers that are in there, uh, buffers that are, uh, Apple to, uh, to the lot, um, uh, uh, buffers that are Apple to an entire district. Like if you have an industrial district and it's, adjoining a non-industrial use. There's some provisions that require you to buffer it pretty well. And then we developed And I won't take like full credit at all for this because it's something we had worked with another city on they were very interested in retaining the scenic corridors that they had in the city and it so it essentially requires landscaping and certain buffers to be in front of a building so that when you're when you're going along the scenic route, your sense is that you're in a really rural or agricultural place. It's great along farmland, and so that's what that little diagram is. And then the, I guess, was it the planning commission that established the two places, those two specific locations, or did y'all recommend, I don't remember. Yep. At any rate, so that tells you where the scenic corridors are supposed to be. That little table on the right. There are lighting standards, and they relate to, again, they're by context. There are lighting fixtures that are a very rural look. Might be a wooden pole with a light hung at the top of it. There are some that are very urban, and so they vary by context. context again, and not only the pole but also the lighting fixture at the top of the pole as well. And this is you.

Article 16 is your sign ordinance, ultimately. So it's just, as you can see, there's a list of a lot of different sign types that are allowed depending on what district you're in. And again, they are context sensitive. Some are more rural, some are more urban. But each one has standards under the type and what districts they're allowed in. And then there's some additional sign standards that... may be applicable to the entire city, not district specific that are in there. Article 17 and 18, 17 is utilities and telecommunication. This is pretty much from your existing ordinance. So we don't have to talk about that one. And then article 18 is really talking about natural resources. So steep slopes, tree protection, erosion, sedimentation, and then stormwater management. There's no 19 because there was one and now it's a placeholder essentially because it would have messed every numbering system up.

And I'm not going to take y'all through the administration and approval process. Y'all know it better than I do. And I've been here as y'all have conducted business, both the planning commission and the city council. You'd be surprised how some cities, how bad some cities are at that. But y'all are good at that. Sometimes it's like crazy world, nearly at every motion that's made. So this is all about just the main decision makers, City Council Planning Commission, Board of Zoning Appeals, the Historic District Commission, and then there's some others in there as well. Uh, the staff has, um, a limited degree of discretion in, in, um, in certain decisions that are, and it is laid out in the document when they have a, um, when they could, for instance, waive a particular requirement under certain circumstances. Um, but it goes through, there's, um, there are tables in this section that talk about the review authority. Um, uh, there's another table that talks about hearings, um, But just the permitting process, the application process, one of the things that's had a good bit of work done on it is the requirements for each of the application types. Some things had been done sort of as a matter of kind of practice over the years, and we tried to bring those things all forward in, like, what does somebody have to submit for it to be a complete application? plot development plan application and literally lay out each one of them and so you don't have to guess like well okay well do I have to have a traffic impact study on this one or not and hopefully that works better for everybody both the applicants and for the decision makers and then the final article up here is the enforcement articles just given notice of a violation, given them, um, an opportunity to curate if it's curable, um, and then remedies and penalties, um, if they don't.

There's two more slides. The last one is definitions. So pretty straightforward, but it's kind of a combination of some of your existing stuff and then including some new stuff because it is form-based to an extent. It should be more illustrative. There's a lot of images and, or not images. models and diagrams and things like that to kind of help you understand those definitions and terms. And one thing I wanted to mention is that every word in the zoning ordinance that is capitalized should be defined. So if you're reading through a paragraph and a word like buffer is randomly capitalized, it's because that means it's defined in Article 23. And then lastly, I think y'all have been given the zoning map. This is the latest version. We're not going to go into this, but this is the latest version. Okay. Thank you.