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| Matthew B. Ackerman,
LEED AIA |
| Jeffrey L.
Zucker, LEED AIA |
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Thanks
a Lot, Mr. Mayor
I must say I'm impressed. Mayor Wilson is moving
forward on his pledge to bring more sustainable Smart Growth practices
to our community. As far as I can tell, he's been working
double-time to generate the citizen involvement and City Hall support,
in order to make such a thing happen. I volunteered earlier this
year (now why do I keep doing
that?), for the Mayor's 2050 Vision Smart Growth/Development
Committee. The core of our committee's vision is to recommend the
adoption of a SmartCode
for the City of Prescott.
Out of the dozen or so volunteers who signed up for this committee, I
was 'volunteered' to be its chairman (now why do they keep doing that?). It
suited me just fine though, because I, like the Mayor, and so many
others in our community, have been dismayed, if not alarmed, by the way
our fair city continues to sprawl outward, slicing off hillsides and
filling in the valleys below, little resembling the walkable downtown
charm of the Courthouse Square, Whiskey Row, or the older in-town
neighborhoods like Mt. Vernon Street. These older "places" are
the
main reason people move here– but not because they're old, but
rather, because they've been designed for people first, and only secondarily
for cars. Folks can tell the difference, you know.
They're places where most everyone likes to be.
 The
sad part though, is that once someone moves here, it doesn't
take long for one to realize that what we've actually built for
them to live, work, and shop in, really doesn't have much to do with
what brought them here in the first place. Despite the beauty
(and inherently smart) pattern of development that our wise (and
looking 'wiser' all the time) city fathers originally employed to lay
out the town, it
seems we've been unable to extend their initial "human-oriented" urban
fabric beyond our downtown core. It's like some cruel
bait-and-switch game for newcomers.
The culprit? Current codes have made single-use, big-box, strip
development quick and easy to obtain permits for and construct, while
the more complex, mixed-use development patterns found in our downtown
square are actually illegal
now-a-days,
requiring one zoning variance after another, if it were to be built
today. Now, that's a
problem.
The most encouraging event for me recently however, was being invited
to present the work that our 2050 Smart Growth group
has done so far, to the City's Unified Development Code (UDC)
Committee. The UDC Committee Members, already given a heads-up on the
benefits of Smart
Growth by City staff, were pumped, primed, and basically receptive
to the
(slightly radical?) notion of adopting a SmartCode for the City of
Prescott.
The adoption of such a code would be no easy task. Resources
would
have to be committed to adapt a boilerplate SmartCode for the City, in
a way that makes sense for the area. Planning and Zoning
officials, city staff, developers, and even lending institutions would
have to be educated. The
characteristics and components of a code which encourages a mix of
uses, and employs zoning categories based on building 'form', rather
than building 'use', is inherently more complex. And yet, despite
the work entailed in adopting and then administrating such a code, the
UDC Committee members seemed unanimously in favor of moving forward
with
the idea. Their request to Community Development Director Tom
Guice at the end of my presentation, was "…what are the next steps?"
But hey, wait a minute– a decision by the UDC folks to
move forward with a SmartCode, may very well pre-empt my own Smart
Growth Committee's core recommendation! Great. The Mayor
has worked so effectively on making this happen within the City, that
it
looks like our 2050 Smart Growth Committee might just have to find
something else to "recommend"
before our final committee reports are due in December.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Mayor.
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