A Planning and Zoning Commission has two distinct functions. One is planning. The second is zoning. Kyle’s Planning and Zoning Commission does an OK job with the zoning function, for the most part. But when it comes to the planning part, the commissioners have blinders on. It’s not only the current group of commissioners who are totally lacking in vision, it seems to come with the territory. In my six-plus-year history with Kyle’s P&Z, it’s been evident that it’s members have only been concerned with the here and now and are incapable of having a vision for the city’s future.
This first became readily apparent more than four years ago when it came time for the mid-term update of the city’s Comprehensive Plan. City Manager Scott Sellers decided he would not waste taxpayer funds to hire outside consultants to draft a proposed revision, but tasked the Planning and Zoning Commission with the responsibility. The city council went along with Sellers’ idea.
However, this task completely bewildered and stumped the P&Z commissioners. It was as if city staff had asked them to walk to the moon. They were incapable of carrying out this assignment. Asking them to update the plan for the city’s future was simply beyond their intellectual capacities. Finally, after much back and forth between a city council demanding the planning and zoning commissioners to actually engage in planning the city’s future and a group of P&Z commissioners who claimed they didn’t know how, an exasperated Mayor Todd Webster finally threw up his hands and said, in effect, “Well, at least come up with revisions to the city’s land-use map.” But even this assignment left the commissioners bewitched, bothered and bewildered. It was at that point I decided it was no longer enough to carp about the inadequacies of P&Z from the sidelines, I should try to be more hands on. So I actually volunteered to join the commission and the city council, some of them admittedly reluctantly, voted to add me as a member. My hope was that, as a disciple of the teachings of Charles Marohn Jr., Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and other visionaries of municipal planning, I could bring those ideas to the planning functions of the commission.
I enjoyed some successes, but they were sublimated by the still narrow-band thinking processes employed by the overwhelming majority of commission members. It became exasperating, to cite just one example, to hear commissioners constantly demanding traffic studies while, at the same time, watching them make decisions that only resulted in increasing traffic – commissioners still stuck in the present without a clue about how to look into the future. The future? To them, that was for the next generation to deal with. They couldn’t be bothered with it. And so, exasperated to the point where it was adversely affecting my health, I resigned from the commission and, at the same time, put this journal into hiatus for a couple of years.
For some reason — looking back on it now, I can only describe that reason as masochistic — I watched the P&Z in action again last night. And it was dismaying to see that, after all these years, nothing has changed. The commissioners are still stuck in the here and now. And they are still controlled by their own prejudices and bigotries that have tarnished so many of their decisions in the past. I guess this is a predictable because those who make the most noise in this city are those who are stuck in the city’s past, people who only look in front of them in order to gaze into their rear view mirrors. This became apparent years ago during the debate on a city manager’s residence. Of course the city was also somewhat culpable in that debacle in that they rolled out the idea at an inopportune moment and failed miserably to communicate the vision behind the idea. But then, as last week’s insurrection in Washington proved, facts mean absolutely nothing to a lynch mob.
I mentioned the name of Charles Marohn Jr. earlier. It’s easy to see these folks on P&Z have probably never heard of Marohn, let alone attended one of his lectures or read any of his essays on sustainable community planning. As a result of this complete lack of vision, the city of Kyle is nothing more than a collection of zones, not a cohesive group of sustainable neighborhoods. There is a small glimmer of hope, however. The possibility of one sustainable neighborhood is on the horizon in what is now being referred to as “Uptown,” an area north of Kohlers Crossing and west of FM 1626. It is not a coincidence that P&Z has had absolutely no role in the planning of Uptown. That vision has largely been the brainchild of forward-thinking individuals like Mayor Travis Mitchell, who, in fact, did become a Marohn disciple shortly after he initially joined the city council, and a vision that has been promulgated by like-minded council members.
Last night, P&Z was considering whether to rezone the vacant property immediately south of the Target-Kohl’s commercial development on Marketplace Boulevard. Their considerations were dismaying, disheartening and downright threatening to Kyle’s future sustainability in too many ways to count. The prospective owner of the property wanted to change the property’s zoning from retail uses to multi-family uses with the idea of locating a uniquely urbanized residential complex there — not only a use recommended by the city’s Comprehensive Plan but one that adheres to the vision of what Marohn refers to as “a strong town.” Some of the commissioners — in fact, most of them — objected because, they said, they wanted a mixed-use development there. This was an idiotic argument not only because, as always, it was an argument for the present and not the future, but it also displayed for all the world to see the blinders that result in “P&Z tunnel vision.” In other words, their only concept of a mixed use development is a single building with retail on the ground floor and, predominantly office space, with perhaps a sprinkling of residential on the upper floors. What they failed to see, because of their complete lack of vision, is that this project offered another form of a mixed-use development — a version of retail only steps away, i.e., just across one narrow street, from the residential. They could not envision it as a whole. So, as a result, if P&Z has its way, the property will remain vacant, an albatross on the city’s tax roles, an additional burden on homeowners in the city, because there is no demand to install any form of retail on that property. Which is simply another example of the paradox that is the Kyle Planning & Zoning Commission. These individuals, who, as I said, are not visionaries, but merely a reflection of the biases of the city as a whole, are prejudiced against apartments and apartment dwellers. The rejection of this application was simply another example of that bigotry. They won’t admit to it. Some of them may not even realize it. But their actions prove this is true. Part of this is because no one on the commission is an apartment dweller. For example, during their all-too-brief and non-sensical discussion on this issue, not one commissioner ever uttered the words “density” or "sustainability." But that, of course, would have required some concept of the word “planning” to commissioners who only consider their responsibility to be “zoning.”
The Kyle Planning & Zoning Commission actually had, within its grasp, the opportunity to create a sustainable neighborhood, a community with residences whose inhabitants had a major grocery store, department stores and a variety of dining options within easy walking distance. But sustainability is a formula for a stronger future, and considering the city's future is still obviously beyond the intellectual capacity of the P&Z. So they blew it. All but one. The commission voted 6-1 against this opportunity for a sustainable neighborhood.
There is hope, however, although it will never come from a reclamation of the planning & zoning commission. It appears beyond salvation, at least in my lifetime. There is the possibility this entire decision has been removed, for all the reasons I have just enumerated, from P&Z’s jurisdiction (even though it is, by statute, only a recommendation body, not a statutory one). The city council is increasingly relying on development agreements for projects such as this and there is the distinct possibility that the city and the developer have already entered into a development agreement that will allow this project to move along as envisioned.
At least, someone is looking at the city’s future.
