Detailed plans to make improvements to North Little Rock's Park Hill and Levy neighborhoods are ready for the City Council's approval after numerous public meetings to explain its features to property owners and calm any fears.
The project, from federal Jump Start grants, created development overlay plans for both the Park Hill and Levy areas of the city. The grants, awarded in October 2013, provide up to $200,000 each in federal planning assistance funds and are coordinated by Metroplan, central Arkansas' long-range-planning agency.
At Tuesday's City Council meeting, aldermen will consider two separate ordinances that largely mirror one another to implement the recommended development overlay plans for Park Hill and Levy, a process that took more than a year and a half to finalize and included more than 30 public meetings.
The plans, approved unanimously by the city Planning Commission on May 12, recommend future rezoning to allow for a commercial-residential mix of development.
Mayor Joe Smith said last week that he expects to call both ordinances for a vote Tuesday. The City Council is meeting Tuesday because of the Memorial Day holiday today.
"It's been a long process, an evolving process," said North Little Rock Community Planning Director Robert Voyles, whose department is overseeing the implementation of a consultant's recommendations, along with the city Planning Commission. "It will help to revitalize both the Park Hill and Levy areas.
"We look forward to the redevelopment potential and hope this helps," Voyles said of the plans. "We had over 30 meetings with public engagement. We had more of an intensive outreach than ever has happened in these strategic areas."
The plans, with stated goals of revitalizing the two areas to be more "vibrant, livable, walkable" through changing zoning classifications, were met early on with apprehension. At Planning Commission public hearings late last year, some property owners said the minute details in the proposals -- the final documents are 84 pages for Park Hill and 95 pages for Levy -- caused confusion and were too difficult to comprehend.
"When you don't understand something, there's the immediate fear factor," said Jenna Rhodes, the city's Jump Start coordinator. "When you're able to talk about it and ask questions, I think people did get a lot more comfortable with it. We had so many meetings to give people as many opportunities as possible to learn about it. The documents are also online. We tried really hard to be as transparent as possible.
"I think the more time people spent with it and the more time people had with the actual documents, the more conversations they were able to have with one another and with city staff and with the consultant, that's the transformation I saw in how they felt," she said.
Voyles agreed, saying that people are more likely to "speak up about their fears more than what the document actually says."
"There's been misunderstandings that the government is forcing them to build mixed-use development," Voyles said. "We're certainly not doing that. A lot of property owners don't want to be bothered. If they continue the way they are, they certainly can continue what they're doing. We only can try to make a difference. We can't force a difference onto people."
Rhodes and Voyles both said that "everybody is grandfathered in" and that the rezoning recommendations are only triggered when changes are made.
"If nothing changes, they don't have to do anything," Rhodes said. "Even the sale of a property will not trigger the plan.
"This is really just a tool, a guide to future development," she said of the plans.
Metro on 05/25/2015