Hit ‘reset’ on UDO and find a vision, planning director says

Charlotte’s planning director, on the job since January, is recommending the zoning rewrite process underway pause for what he calls a “reset.” During that time, he says, the city should spend 15 to 18 months to engage in a wide-ranging community effort to produce a new vision plan for the city.

“It took me a few weeks of realizing that we were struggling with engaging the community,” Planning Director Taiwo Jaiyeoba said in an interview with PlanCharlotte.org. “ ‘Place Types,’ ‘UDO’ … the nomenclature was not really connecting or resonating with the people.”

It’s been six years since the city in 2012 began studying whether to change its 1980s-vintage zoning requirements. In 2015 it hired a consultant to help the process and began looking at combining multiple development-related ordinances into one Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO.

Some planning professionals have questioned whether it’s a good idea to redo zoning standards if the city doesn’t have an overarching vision of what it wants those ordinance changes to produce.

“The last time Charlotte really had a true comprehensive plan was 1975,” Jaiyeoba said. “It mentioned mass transit. It had some really neat ideas.” Called the Comprehensive Plan 1995, it looked ahead 20 years.

“We’re the largest city in the entire state without one (a comprehensive plan). We’re the largest city in the Southeast without one,” Jaiyeoba said. He pointed out that state law says a zoning ordinance “shall be made in accordance with a comprehensive plan.”

The Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory group, last November expressed its concerns to the council about the lack of a vision, “minimal civic engagement and the slow pace of the work.” Last month, the commission chair – Deb Ryan – an urban design professor at UNC Charlotte – wrote Charlotte City Council members saying, “Five months later, the same problems persist.”

Jaiyeoba said he would make a full presentation on his recommendation to the City Council later this month or in early June. He said he’ll propose that city planners rebrand the whole initiative – currently known by its acronym as “the UDO process” or else by “Place Types,” a term few in the community seem to understand. He wants a larger community engagement process.

But, he cautioned in the interview, he does not envision a lengthy comprehensive plan process taking three years or more. In his view, engaging the community in a visioning process could proceed while some UDO process work continues, in concert with the larger planning effort. With a vision plan in place, he estimated the rest of the UDO work could take only about six months longer. He was at the national American Planning Association conference last month in New Orleans, he said, and other cities have also done a comprehensive-type plan in the midst of doing a UDO. And he noted that the Charlotte planning staff had already done a lot of work in the past two years on the UDO process. “That work is not wasted,” he said, “but will help accelerate putting a vision and the implementation tool in place.”

The vision plan, he said, “will balance community interests. It will protect our valued community resources. It will set the tone for what the UDO itself will begin to implement.”

He predicted that his recommendation would cause some people to question the already drawn-out schedule for reworking the UDO. But, he said, “If we’re going to do something bold and visionary, let’s just do it.”