Planning director Howard Koontz informed the five of the seven commissioners who attended last night’s Planning & Zoning Commission meeting that its normal second meeting for this month, the gathering that would normally take place Jan. 24, would actually be a joint meeting with the City Council, the sole purpose of which will be to complete the update of the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
Just about a year ago the city decided it would be a waste of taxpayer moneys to hire outside consultants to perform what was thought to be elementary edits to the Comp Plan. So the City Council asked the Planning & Zoning Commission to perform the task instead. The P&Z commissioners, however, misunderstood the assignment, translating "elementary edits" into "wholesale overhaul," threw up their collective hands and said "We’re not qualified to do this. The city needs to hire consultants." As a result, P&Z’s recommendations on changes to the plan consisted of a letter in which the commissioners recommended all the areas consultants should be hired to change.
It was a clear Cool Hand Luke communications problem, so the City Council said let’s meet with the commissioners, go over the plan, and get the job done ourselves in one work session. There’s been talk about this session for months now, but finally it appears it’s about to happen starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 24, in the council chambers.
Hopefully, council members will take the time during this session to inform the commissioners the Comp Plan is merely that — a plan, not a collection of ironclad rules. In fact, Section 203.002 of the Texas Local Government Code states a city's Comprehensive Plan "does not establish or contain zoning regulations nor does it establish zoning district boundaries." I will make the following guarantee: If a company such as Texas Instruments wanted to locate a big, honking wafer fab in Kyle that employed 500 persons, it could locate that facility on any piece of vacant or abandoned land anywhere it wanted to, regardless of what the Comprehensive Plan says. Five hundred new jobs trumps the Comp Plan every single day of the week.
So the next regular Planning & Zoning Commission meeting will take place on Valentine’s Day at which time the oft-postponed three rezoning proposals for new home developments will be resubmitted, albeit with some modifications. It turned out my guess (as outlined in this update) as to why the applicants for the three requests asked for a postponement of any decision from P&Z last night was right on the money.
"The application for re-zoning of the Blanton and Kaminski tracts was requested to be postponed by the developer until such time that the City of Kyle completes their deliberation and approval of the recent Code amendments," Edward Guerrero, the listed applicant on the Blanton and Kaminski tracts, told me yesterday. "We anticipate both applications being placed back on the P&Z meeting agenda with the requests collectively amended from R-1-A to R-1-3, which will be a more restrictive zoning category than R-1-A once approved."
It turns out the most recent City Council meeting agenda did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As you can see for yourself here, the captions on the first five items in Section V (Consider and Possible Action) were preceded by the parenthetical notation "First Reading." The caption for Item, 23 on the other hand, this zoning changes that affect these applications, did not contain that parenthetical identification. However, Koontz told me last night that a council agenda should be viewed like the city’s Comp Plan — as a guide, but not a final arbiter. He said, in reality, that item was a first reading, even if the agenda didn’t label it as such, and the second reading will be on next week’s council Consent Agenda.
That means there is no such animal as R-1-3 zoning until this item is approved by council next week and I have no doubt it will be approved. It has already been debated. It passed last week 5-2 and I don’t see the possibility of two council members changing their minds to vote the other way on this proposal.
The only issue with the applicants is that they assumed that, upon council passage, they could return to P&Z on the 24th to request the new zoning. I know they assumed this because they told me that was their plan. Now they will have to wait until next month. But, then, so too does all those who are arguing the developers should be responsible for fixing flooding problems not of their making or constructing crosstown highways (I’m not kidding! Someone actually made that argument during citizen comments at last night’s P&Z hearing) will have to wait until the Valentine’s Day lovefest to grumble about how they want the city to stay just like it is, not change, not grow, not improve its tax base one single bit.
One thing I don’t quite understand, however, is why Guerrero described R-1-3 as "a more restrictive zoning category than R-1-A." The only restriction in R-1-3 is in its density, or lack of same. In R-1-3, no more than 5.5 houses per buildable acre can be constructed, while R-1-A allows 6.8. So I guess it is restrictive in the number of homes you can build on the same amount of land, but the revised R-1-A zoning will also be primarily for attached single family residences and attached residences, by definition, will have a higher density than detached. In addition, the only kind of permitted additional uses in R-1-A are buildings needed for the construction of the project or sheds on individual lots as long as those sheds are not used for any kind of "business or commercial enterprise." R-1-A allows those two same additional uses along with parks, playgrounds, community buildings, libraries, museums, police/fire stations, schools (both public and private), reservoirs and pumping plants, to list just a few.
In other action last night, the gang of five (commissioners Allison Wilson and Irene Melendez were absent) skated on extremely thin ice in refusing to grant a request to recommend the council rezone a small tract of land at 1381 Goforth Road to warehouse zoning and recommended retail services zoning instead. The reason I say they were on shaky ground here is because their decision, which passed with the narrowest possible margin with chair Dex Ellison and commissioner Timothy Kay voting against, seemed to be swayed by the fact that the possible new owner of the property wanted to locate a pet service facility there and retail services zoning was applied to another person who wanted to install a similar facility in another part of town. That, however, is a land use issue and it is illegal in Texas to consider land uses in zoning requests. Even recently appointed commissioner Mike Torres, who led the charge against the warehouse zoning, based his argument on land use issues, albeit on what the land might be used for in the future.
The applicants told me after P&Z’s decision was rendered that they might appeal directly to the City Council for the warehouse zoning. They did plan to talk to Koontz about the issue today and Koontz told me last night that, while RS zoning is indeed more restrictive than W, it shouldn’t have that much effect on what the owners want to do with the land and that, in fact, he thought the applicants were misinformed as to just what those restrictions were.
One of the issues here is that the owner of the land wants to sell it and the person he has lined up to buy it will only do so if he gets the zoning change he wants. At present, there’s a single structure located at the extreme rear of the property, I would estimate it to be at least 1,500 feet from Goforth Road entrance to the property. The applicants said they planned to convert that structure into their planned doggie hotel.
So far today I have not received any responses from my requests for additional information from the applicants. If and when I do, I will provide that update at the end of this article.
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