Starkville is hoping to have the first draft of a long-awaited development code rewrite completed by early March.
The development code lays out the city’s requirements for certain zoning and land type designations and the processes for building new developments or altering existing ones — whether they be residential, commercial or industrial.
The code rewrite is meant to revamp and modernize the development. City Planner Daniel Havelin, who has worked on the rewrite alongside Assistant City Planner Emily Corban, said the process is correcting errors city staff have discovered in land use designations and emphasizing a more user-friendly code for ordinary citizens.
For example, the updated code will include a chart that will allow someone looking to develop something in a particular zone type and see its requirements at a glance.
Havelin said it also takes development goals laid out in the city’s comprehensive plan, adopted in 2016, and codifies them.
“It’s taking these place types (land use designations), which we are constantly referring to, and putting them in a zone that’s similar to what they were described as being in the first place,” Havelin said.
At Friday’s work session in City Hall, Havelin said the code rewrite is about 64 percent complete.
Starkville began its code rewriting process in 2017, after adopting the updated comprehensive plan.
Starkville aldermen approved a $219,973 contract in June 2015 with The Walker Collaborative LLC, a Tennessee-based firm, to draft the city’s comprehensive plan and update the code. The contract included $140,913 for the comprehensive plan and $76,060 for the code rewrite. The city adopted the plan in December 2016 and the firm continued work on the code rewrite into 2017.
“We had a consultant doing it,” Mayor Lynn Spruill said. “We’re now doing it in-house. We had a fundamental product from which to work, but we quickly realized that in a lot of cases the consultants are giving you boilerplate sort of stuff from which to work and we needed to tailor it to our community.”
Fixing errors
Havelin said city staff first discovered a place-typing error along Lindbergh Boulevard, which runs through the heart of residential areas north of Highway 12. Land east of the road was place typed for a traditional single-family neighborhood — which fit with the homes built on the land.
However, to the west, the land was place-typed as a rural neighborhood, which requires one house per three acres and does not match the character of the homes built in the area.
“Obviously, that was majorly wrong,” Havelin said. “Once we discovered that, we went parcel-by-parcel and found errors that were from a shift in the property line to absolutely labeled wrong.
“That’ll be one of the things we’ll have to do — to get the board to adopt and modify the place type map in the comprehensive plan,” he added. “There’s also going to be, ultimately, a new zoning map as part of all this.”
Simplification efforts for the code rewrite include adjusting its zoning designations, of which there are currently more than 20.
The new zoning map update, Havelin said, will not necessarily repurpose property — especially land already in use, though some names may change. He said, for example, that the term “C-2” zoning — what has been commonly known as “highway commercial” — might no longer be used, but it will be replaced by something that holds the same requirements.
Havelin and Corban are also trying to build in infill rules for the updated code, which will encourage new development to fit with what’s around it in similarly-zoned areas.
“You’ll take what’s around you,” he said. “You’ll line up with the houses around you. Your sides will be set back similarly to those. If there’s parking in the front, you can park in the front. If not, you can park on the sides or the back like they do. Your building’s got to be similar to the height of the buildings around you.”
Streamlining and modernizing
Havelin said the code rewrite also aims to streamline certain processes. For example, he said someone looking to subdivide a residential lot into two lots now has to go through the same process as a developer looking to build a 200-lot neighborhood.
“It’s the same process, the same requirements, and that’s a little more than it needs to be,” he said. “We’ve put in stuff to kind of make that easier.”
The city is also looking to make the code more accessible for the ordinary user. Havelin said the staff has looked to examples from other cities, in Mississippi and across the U.S., on how to make the code easier to understand.
He said part of the drafting process will include creating graphics to more easily illustrate what the requirements laid out in the code’s various sections mean.
It should, he said, be a marked difference from the city’s current “dry” code.
“Any ordinance should be easily understood,” he said. “When it gets too wordy and you start losing the professionals who deal every day with the wording, then the average citizen’s not going to get it.”
Ward 2 Alderman Sandra Sistrunk said she feels it’s a good time to update Starkville’s code, much of which is decades old.
“A lot of our old code is what, 50 to 60 years old now,” she said. “It’s time. I’m very, very excited about this.”
Spruill said the update is part of what she sees a normal, healthy work to keep the city’s processes up-to-date.
“Every community ought to be looking at what it does every five to 10 years,” she said. “This is a part of that normal growth process.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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