Fayetteville Planning Commission talks long-range goals

FAYETTEVILLE -- Planning Commissioners spent Saturday discussing long-range planning goals while staying socially distanced and wearing masks during their first in-person meeting since March.

Eight of nine commissioners joined planning staff at the open-air meeting room of Botanical Gardens of the Ozarks for a retreat. The meeting was open to the public and also set up online via Zoom.

Topics included downtown planning, the future of College Avenue running through town, annexation policies and development patterns in the city.

The city's downtown master plan was developed and adopted from 2004 to 2006. It includes a visionary document and a zoning map that covers roughly Maple Street south to Archibald Yell Boulevard and University Avenue east to College Avenue.

City administrators plan to hire a contractor who will update the plan. The commission discussed some issues the contractor should address.

For instance, not all streets should be treated the same, commissioners agreed.

"We don't need to treat every single street like it's Dickson," Commissioner Matt Hoffman said.

Architectural standards for buildings should reflect a street's unique style, he said. Hoffman also suggested using alleys as zoning boundaries, rather than street frontages, to create a smoother transition between densities and different types of structures.

Development Review Manager Jonathan Curth said the current downtown plan and regulations don't take into account the reality on the ground. Staff needs more flexibility to approve projects that don't meet the letter of the code, rather than having Planning Commission approval every time, he said.

"Almost every property I've ever looked at for a development downtown is on a slope," Curth said. "That affects things like entrances and grading, and you all have seen them all over and over again."

Several beautiful older buildings downtown don't meet the downtown design code, so it needs to be revisited, Commissioner Rob Sharp said.

U.S. 71B, also known mostly as College Avenue, became a city street this year, enabling planners to make changes to the stretch without approval from the Arkansas Department of Transportation.

The city hired a consultant who came up with a vision plan for the corridor last year. The plan identifies potential areas of redevelopment and road improvements and calls for comprehensive rezoning.

The commission decided to seek a rezoning that would expand the variety of land uses. Right now, the corridor is almost exclusively commercial. One stretch, between Maple and North Streets, was rezoned in 2017.

The idea would be to offer land owners the wider variety of uses, such as residential, on a volunteer basis. That way, areas ripe for redevelopment could be steered in a new direction, commissioners agreed.

"We wouldn't just fix a few broken curbs and put in some trees and this and that," Commissioner Tom Brown said. "What we want to do is change the nature of College Avenue."

Annexation considerations should be more deliberate, commissioners said.

"As a policy matter, we're saying we're not going to take on land just because," Sharp said. "We need a pretty good idea of a comprehensive vision."

Commissioners suggested requiring a planned zoning district, or at least a conceptual plan, be attached to future annexation requests.

The commission also talked about developing zoning ordinances exclusively for annexed parts of town that would usher conservation-minded, extremely low-density neighborhoods on the city's periphery. Those types of projects should maintain a rural character and consider the unique natural aspects of the land, commissioners agreed.