How ugly do the city fathers (and mothers) want Kyle to be when it grows up? From what I gathered listening to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission discussing the Kyle’s landscape ordinance they want it to be pretty damned ugly. Heaven forbid that Kyle should ever be the home of an office building that looks like this, or this, or even this. And we certainly don’t want manufacturing concerns with campuses like this, or this, or this.
Contrary to what these pictures prove, the KPZC argues that businesses won’t locate here if the city requires them to have more than 10 percent of their property landscaped. Let them put a potted plant at the front door and we’ll call it day.
Current landscape ordinances require that those properties zoned R-1-1 and R-1-2 (both single family residential designations); R-1-A (single family attached/detached); R-2 (duplexes); and M-1, M-2 and M-3 (all manufactured housing designations) must plant "a minimum of two four-inch trees, six two-gallon shrubs and lawn grass from the front property lines to the front two corners of the structure ..." The problem the zoning folks had were with those big dad-gum trees. Chairman Mike Rubsam said trees that are no smaller than 2½ inches are plenty big enough for him. Of course, the real issue here is how fast will these trees grow and the answer to that is it depends on the type of tree. The most common tree planted in Texas is the Red Maple and it can grow between 1 to 2 feet per year. So, splitting the difference, if you put it a 2½ inch diameter, 4-feet tall red maple now, in 25 years that sucker will be 41½ feet tall. Of course, you have to wait a quarter of a century for that and by that time ....
But, to be honest, the tree issue is not that one that bothered me. It was the area-of-land-devoted-to-landscaping topic that I found wanting. Current landscape ordinances require that those properties zoned R-1-T (townhomes), R-1-C (condominiums), R-3-1 (multifamily), R-3-3 (apartments) and CBD-1 (Central Business District 1) devote 20 percent of their respective properties to landscaping. Rubsam noted that areas zoned for hospitals and neighborhood commercial also fell into this category and, in his view, 20 percent of their property devoted to landscaping was simply too onerous a requirement. He wanted it dropped to 15.
But that’s not all. He thought that areas zoned for warehouses and commercial uses, which now must have 15 percent of their property landscaped, be dropped down to 10 percent. Everyone on the commission seemed to buy into it. In fact, commissioner Dan Ryan said if these landscape requirements weren’t lowered, businesses would simply not locate in Kyle.
Hogwash!
According to reports I’ve seen, the No. 1 reason an entrepreneur will locate a business in a certain area is that nebulous factor known as "quality of life." Specifically that means, an adequate and talented labor pool, easy access to customers and suppliers, good schools, parks, cultural amenities and restaurants. In fact, in a recent survey of 150 founders of some of the fastest growing companies in the United States, "only 2% of respondents mentioned business-friendly regulations or policies when discussing why they founded their company in a specific city." (You can read that entire report here.)
So instead of taking steps that make Kyle less attractive to the naked eye, I would be going in exactly the opposite direction. One of the first steps I would take is to put a temporary hiatus on discussing changes to the city’s landscaping ordinances and instead put out a bid for a forestry consultant to oversee the development of a landscaping master plan designed to enhance, not detract, from the city’s quality of life.
Instead of boasting about to prospective business owners about how little landscaping they will be required to install, tout Kyle’s location that features quick and easy access to the Bergstrom Airport via toll roads 45 and 130, the proximity to the labor pools produced by graduates of the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University, the easy access to outstanding cultural and athletic amenities offered by Austin, San Marcos and San Antonio and the fact that just about every shopping need a consumer has can be satisfied by no more than a 5-minute drive right here in Kyle.
Admittedly, I am a recent transplant to Kyle. But this is where I have decided I want to live the rest of my life. This is going to be my final home. And I want that home to be "more," not "less." I want our city fathers (and mothers) looking for ways to make that home more attractive, not uglier.
I can assure you that there is not an attempt to make Kyle ugly. I was not in attendance at the P&Z meeting but the landscaping requirements in our ordinances have been an issue for a long time. The problem is that the requirements do not scale properly and place disproportionate burdens on property developers as the projects go up in size. We have addressed this by granting a variance for nearly every business that has come to Kyle since the ordinance was adopted. The disproportionate impact was not intentional and I can say this because I helped draft the original ordinance. We recognized the problem early on but could not make a change back then because the entire ordinance was the subject of a lawsuit challenging any municipality's ability to adopt requirements at all. Changing the ordinance would have complicated the facts at issue in that case so we were frozen. Addressing the landscaping scale problem in the ordinance is long overdue. Whether the proposed changes that may be recommended by P&Z are accepted and adopted by the city council is a different issue. However, I do not believe that their motives are to make Kyle ugly as your post suggests. Todd Webster, Mayor
ReplyDelete