Inter-Neighborhood Council

Making Better Neighborhoods

Http://www.rtpnet.org/durhminc

Minutes of Meeting of December 9,2003

REPRESENTATIVES PRESENT

Administration and Announcements

President Cheryl Sweeney opened the meeting, and members introduced themselves.

Park Design – Sarah Burroughs of Haden-Stanziale gave a presentation about the range of things parks could be, based on use (active, passive, specialty, conservation or mix), size and service area (regional down to urban), and users. A masterplan lets you assess what you have, where you have surpluses and deficits compared to similar communities, and what areas are underserved. Although there are guidelines on things like how many ball fields you need, it is more effective to look at what the specific community needs (how many young families are here, for example). What you can afford to maintain is a key constraint; we shouldn’t rely on volunteers for things that need to be done often.

Uniform Development Ordinance – Frank Duke gave an overview of what is going on. They are re-writing the ordinance to minimize city / county differences (the current one is 2 ordinances in one book), to recognize different character and needs of different parts of the county, and to modernize what is an excellent code for 1970. Some of the changes:

§ Raise the bar on design but make more decisions administrative – if the governing board has no discretion, why get everyone mad at them? Environmental standards (e.g. keeping buildings out of floodplains) will apply in all cases. More developments will have to do sidewalks, bike facilities, traffic impact analysis.

§ Meetings with neighbors and registered neighborhoods will be required before some types of projects (ones where the decision is not administrative) so those affected will have as much time as possible to think about it. One question is whether these are stand-alone scheduled by developer (easier when there are multiple neighborhoods involved) or held at regular neighborhood meetings.

§ Additional neighborhood protection will come from new buffering requirements, a Transitional Office Overlay to replace O&I-1 Limited (which should maintain residential character but have some commercial uses), contextual infill regulations, neighborhood protection overlays (document what is prevalent already and then get a rezoning to preserve this).

§ We need more options for the 10% of people who want alternatives to car-dependent suburbia (meeting maybe 1% of the demand). We are also making the rules support transportation better through the street connectivity index, further rules on when to do Traffic Impact Analysis, and updating land-use where road plans are changing.

§ The planning area (which is more or less the county, but not quite) is divided into 5 tiers. Tier boundaries are still evolving but they will be shown in the Comprehensive Plan, with the UDO specifying how to change them. The uses for a given zone type will be the same in all tiers, but the design standards will be different.

Information / Committee Reports / Business

§ The minutes were approved.

§ Dues are due.

§ The DOT committee is planning a FAQ and a workshop in the spring on how citizens can be more effective on transportation issues.

§ The Crime Summits are looking at the problem of getting resources for criminal justice and the courts.

§ Mike Shiflett had some pictures of different traffic calming measures.

§ Tom Miller went over the first 2 articles of the INC by-laws.

§ A committee to do a phone tree to bring out people to meetings was set up.

The meeting was adjourned.