Zoning revisions presented to council

A raft of changes to the city’s zoning code – referred to as the Community Land Development Code – were presented to Springfield City Council at its meeting last night.

A public hearing was held on two sets of revisions, with votes scheduled for March 24.

Steve Childers, the city’s director of Planning & Development, said the code is a regulatory document that explains rules and procedures for land use in city limits. Updating the code – which had its last comprehensive update in 1995, with minor revisions since – is one of the main priorities outlined in Forward SGF, the city’s 20-year comprehensive plan, adopted in 2022.

The city’s Planning & Zoning Commission voted unanimously to support the updates at its Feb. 13 meeting, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting.

Chris Brewster of Kansas City-based design firm Multistudio, hired by the city to complete the update, addressed council to outline some of the priorities of the code update.

Brewster said three decades is a long time between comprehensive code updates.

“Over time, you amend it; it becomes disjointed and a little harder to work with,” he said. “It’s also dated in terms of some of the policies – it doesn’t reflect Forward SGF and has some things that aren’t necessarily considered best practices, in terms of planning.”

He explained how the approaches of the existing code and the revised code differ.

Of the 1995 version, he said, “We consider it more of a use-based code, which is something that’s just based purely on land uses, and any development and design and things that impact what you physically see are not necessarily afterthoughts, but aren’t as engrained into the code as you might like.”

He said another target of the code shift was to prepare the city for a future of more infill – meaning building on available or vacant lots within the city – and strategic development, as Forward SGF calls for.

Brewster said one of the main themes Forward SGF addresses is neighborhood design and sense of place, with a goal of protecting the character of its unique neighborhoods while providing diverse housing types. Others are providing multimodal and walkable streets, as well as beautification, aesthetic improvements and connecting to nature through trails and open spaces.

“A lot of those themes were very strong in the plan of making more context-based decisions and solutions,” he said.

Quality of place was the driving goal of Forward SGF, he said.

“That was informing just about every decision or idea we considered under the code update,” he said.

The place-type approach is one main consideration of the plan.

“The plan also acknowledges street types, and thinking of streets and public spaces differently than you have in the past, so not thinking of them just purely as their traffic capacity, but how are the design elements of the street adding and contributing to those place types as well,” he said.

Land use, some elements of form and some elements of design are already present in the code, he said, but the new code is more flexible and lenient about land use with more specificity on form and design.

“Those are the things that really determine impacts of development on adjacent property or on streetscapes,” he said.

Feedback from council included suggestions and an acknowledgement of the size of the undertaking.

Councilmember Monica Horton noted a fiscal impact analysis is part of the regulatory plan, and requested an explanation.

Brewster said one rationale is to strengthen and emphasize why some mixed-use areas of Forward SGF are important.

“Some of the more compact, mixed-use areas actually are quite high returning in investment when you think of how much land they’re using and how much infrastructure they’re using,” he said. “A large retail area with large parking lots might look big in terms of numbers and revenue, but it’s also taking up a lot of land and infrastructure.”

He noted even smaller projects can produce a big return.

He also said investing in higher-quality design pays dividends. An example would be adding street trees to a corridor. There’s an aesthetic component, he said, but they also provide stormwater value that can’t be overlooked.

Brewster also responded to Horton’s request for an explanation of mixed residential districts, labeled RMX in the code. These provide so-called missing middle housing, ranging from duplexes to small-scale apartment buildings that can fit on a residential lot.

“They would complement each other and we would see much more strategic rezonings using those districts,” he said.

Horton also asked for an explanation of changes to public hearings and neighborhood meetings.

Brewster said public hearings would not change because they are required by statute.

For neighborhood meetings, the update would not change when they are triggered, but they would set better expectations for how, why and when in the process they occur.

“As far as making changes to getting rid of them to streamline, that is not what is occurring,” Brewster said.

He added that conditional use permit processes will be streamlined and will be decided by P&Z, rather than coming before council.

“When there’s a two-tiered public hearing, you’re often going through the same process twice,” he said, adding council could hear appeals when there is a need for one.