Potential loss of driveways may drive council to hit the brakes

Derek Lee: Without a variance process, it’s hard to move forward.

Monica Horton: Code process driven at behest of business – not at its speed.

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At the March 9 Springfield City Council meeting, Councilmember Derek Lee proposed suspending recently approved driveway code revisions and referring the revisions to council’s Community Involvement Committee for review.

Lee presented his bill for a first reading at the council meeting, with a vote anticipated March 23.

Lee, a civil engineer and owner of Lee Engineering and Associates LLC, said he had received feedback from the development community about consequences of council’s Jan. 12 revisions to Chapter 98 of the code. Those revisions would require more space between driveways and would result in the removal of some of them.

The newly adopted code revisions aim, in part, to reduce conflict points on roadways to improve safety.

At issue is the potential loss of driveway access that could be triggered by permit applications for construction or change of use.

The revised version of the code also limits property owners’ appeals of denials of driveway permits to the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission.

Several businesspeople showed up to the council meeting to express their concerns with the revisions.

Amy Blansit, founder and CEO of Drew Lewis Foundation Inc., addressed problems posed by new regulations to the foundation’s Blue House Project, which she said works to create attainable homeownership for working families.

“We’ve experienced repeatedly in the current appeals structure that there’s no path to resolve conflict between code interpretation and some of the practical housing development plans we’re trying to do,” she said.

She offered the example of the organization’s St. Joe’s Cottage Courtyard at 1108 N. Campbell Ave., where making desired site improvements would trigger a requirement to eliminate an existing driveway, eliminating access to that property and the one behind it and adding substantial cost and time for potential homeowners.

She also brought up the pocket neighborhood called the Broadway Cottage Courtyard, where the foundation is spending money to manage traffic flow by adding a median and speed bumps but has been prohibited from adding driveways.

Blansit said in predevelopment meetings, it is not a collaborative choice between good options but rather a requirement that the Drew Lewis Foundation adhere to code for its projects to move forward.

“Innovation requires collaborative pathways to solve the problems when they arise,” she said. “Without the appeal process or with a longer appeal process, it prevents these meaningful reviews, and organizations like ours are often stopping or not even pursuing the development, knowing that we’re not going to put the density that it’s going to take in order to have affordable housing.”

Councilmember Monica Horton said she knew there would be tradeoffs with Forward SGF, the city’s comprehensive plan. She said Chapter 98 is mainly aimed at larger arterials that jeopardize safety of pedestrians and cyclists.

“I knew that the lofty idea of having affordable housing and micromobility and multimodal transportation – I knew that the tradeoffs would seem to be in conflict with one another,” she said.

Horton said she hopes staff can hear the nuances of Blansit’s message.

“Sometimes the drawback is you don’t move forward at all with an appeals process because there is a preconceived notion about what the outcome would be,” Horton said.

Other feedback
Daniel Richards, an engineer with Lee’s company, spoke in support of the recommendation to suspend the new driveway code.

Richards outlined three different spacing criteria for different types of roads. For primary arterials, like Campbell and Glenstone avenues, the old driveway criteria required driveways to be spaced 200 feet apart, but that has increased to 440 feet in the new criteria.

Secondary arterials, like Kimbrough and Jefferson avenues, increased requirements from 150 to 330 feet between driveways.

For collectors, like Ingram Mill and Fort avenues, spacing requirements for driveways have grown from 100 to 220 feet between driveways.

“These numbers clearly indicate a substantial shift in the access management criteria, and I think it at least warrants further review,” Richards said.

Brett Foster, the city’s assistant director of Public Works, said the old code measured spacing from edge of driveway to edge of driveway while the new code is measured center to center. The increase for primary arterials is thus from 275 to 400 feet – an increase, but not as severe as Richards’ figures suggest, according to Foster.

“Any time you decrease driveway density, you increase safety,” Foster said. “The larger your driveway spacing is in our major streets, the safer those streets will be.”

Developer and commercial real estate broker Tom Rankin described some difficulties with his Springfield Plaza project on the southwest corner of West Sunshine Street and West Bypass. There, he said, he built Seminole Street to the standards required by the city to include a center turn lane that cannot be used under the new code, which requires right in and right out access only off of Seminole into the project.

“I feel quite sure that’s probably an unintended consequence – surely we wouldn’t be building a center turn lane that we can’t use – but nonetheless, I think there’s issues with this ordinance that need to be reviewed,” Rankin said.

Foster, with Public Works, said that is the kind of variance request that would be addressed by staff under the new code. He added that he did not think the issue would be appealable to the Planning & Zoning Commission.

Shannon Handwerker, vice president of operations for Magers Management Co. LLC, described a tenant who sought to rent available retail space at the company’s Battlefield Marketplace development.

Handwerker said switching from retail to fitness tenants would change the use of the property, and that would trigger the loss of the plaza’s two driveways on the east and west sides and the removal of streetlights.

“I would have to put my driveway right in the center of my development, which is where my monument sign is,” she said.

“That’s going to cost me nearly a million dollars just to do that.”

She added that taking on the potential tenant would yield only about $350,000 in rent over a five-year period.

Richard Ollis, owner of Ollis/Akers/Arney on Sunshine Street and a former member of City Council, described how he has battled the Missouri Department of Transportation over the possible closure of his driveway. MoDOT has relaxed a plan to put a median along the full length of East Sunshine Street in the city and has been open to discussion about access points.

“I am currently working with them on finding access into my business – which would be nice, given that I’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into that building,” he said.

But he said if he works out his problems with MoDOT, he doesn’t comply with the city’s new code.

“I’d like to improve my building, but you know what happens if I take out a permit? I’m at risk for the closure of my driveway,” he said.

Ollis said Springfield is a difficult place both to develop and to do business. He cited a lack of certainty, even though businesses can apply for variances.

Dan Brown, the city’s director of Public Works, said the comments offered in the meeting will be useful moving forward.

“Stories like this are very helpful to evaluate the existing code,” he said. “There’s nothing like real-world examples to look at things and make sure that you have the right balance.”

A two-year process led to the code revision, according to Foster. Brown said it makes sense to go back to the stakeholders that contributed to the code revision, though he declined to estimate how long it would take to do so.

A new zoning map is anticipated to come into effect for the city in April, and it corresponds to new land development regulations, Chapter 36 of the city code.

Foster said there are about 20 new definitions in Chapter 98 – the portion of city code covering streets, sidewalks and public places – and another 30 that are revised. He said the Chapter 98 definitions are referenced about 3,000 times in the new section of Chapter 36.

“If you have Chapter 36, new land development code, and you don’t have 98, you’re going to be enforcing a lot of stuff in Chapter 98 that doesn’t exist in the existing code, so it really makes it unusable,” Foster said.

Lee said if the revisions go forward unchanged, that could cause much more harm than a delay could.

“They don’t have a real variance process, and so how do these things move forward?” he said. “We don’t have an answer.”

Amendment fails
A motion by Horton for an amendment to Lee’s bill would have sent the issue to committee without suspending Chapter 98, but it failed, with Councilmembers Callie Carroll, Heather Hardinger, Abe McGull, Mayor Jeff Schrag and Lee opposing it.

Horton’s amendment was geared toward keeping the city’s code revision process on track, and during the meeting she said she hoped a desire for quicker development would not lead council to vote on the measure after hearing only one side of the story.

A March 11 Facebook post offered more insight into Horton’s thinking, with the council member saying, “Heading towards the finish line in less than a month, the community development city code adoption process appears to be slowing down ‘at the behest’ of business rather than moving ‘at the speed of business.’”

Horton said regulations guiding safer access management for streets, driveways and rights-of-way are likely to be held up for an unspecified amount of time in the Community Involvement Committee.

She also noted that a new zoning map that aims to give the city more housing availability and diversity plus walkable neighborhood commercial hub opportunities is also facing hurdles “at the behest of business.”

In her post, Horton called on her Zone 1 constituents to weigh in on the issue from the perspectives of livability and economic sustainability.

“Land development code adoption is within the purview of the built environment a critical domain of social determinants of health,” she wrote. “How cities are redeveloped for the health, safety and welfare of (their) citizens really does impact us. although I do recognize the potentially costly tradeoffs of improved community design standards.”