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Planning Commission stands behind zoning code recommendation as sent to City Council
Earlier in November, the Harbor Springs Planning Commission recommended a newly revised zoning code to City Council, following a year of work after the last zoning code updates, which were approved by Council. That update was then repealed by voters.
The repeal was heavily campaigned for by the We Love Harbor Springs group, and included mailers, digital ads, text messages and more. It passed 478 votes to 404 votes.
However, at the November 20 Planning Commission meeting, a number of recommended changes that were presented by Lynee Wells of Aligned Planning, a consultant contracted by the We Love Harbor Springs group that were provided too late for existing public hearings were back on the agenda.
When the Planning Commission decided to send the zoning updates to Council, their planning consultant, John Iacoangeli with Beckett & Raeder, recommended they still revisit the memo he drafted in response to Wells, and that any agreed upon changes could be sent to City Council (who will also have public hearings and discussion about the zoning changes).
That happened on Monday night.
“She had 37 different comments relative to things she pointed out in the code. Many of them were grammatical, a couple were cross-reference errors,” Iacoangeli said. “She had some recommendations, so I went through each one of her comments.”
Iacoangeli made notations about each one of Wells’ comments regarding if he was in agreement (to also recommend to the Planning Commission), and if he did not agree, why.
“There were only a couple of places that I disagreed,” Iacoangeli said, adding that part of the issue with some of her comments was that she was “brought in at the end of the process, and wasn’t really involved in a lot of the discussion that the Planning Commission has had over the last year to get to those decisions.”
“She just didn’t have the benefit of all that input,” he added.
Iacoangeli said he did not have a problem with most of the suggestions, which again were mainly grammatical, format-issues, and a few cross-references that needed to be updated.
“There is more to the story,” noted Planning Commission chair Bill Mulder, “because she (Lynee Wells) made some comments during the last meeting with some suggestions about the administrative review process, and I think about the first floor height in the CBD, and followed up with another memo received this week detailing those things.”
Mulder said another comment that was made at the last meeting for someone else also requested considering the addition of particular wording that might trigger something downstream for historic preservation.
“I don’t know enough about that to know exactly what it means, but I’d like to,” Mulder said.
Coming back to the memo, he reminded Planning Commissioners the advice by city attorney Jim Ramer at the last meeting was that if Commission members were planning to vote that evening on the ordinance updates, they needed to do so on the updates that were part of the public hearing and had been on the City’s website for three weeks.
“What we could decide tonight is to have John (Iaciangeli) go over his memo with the City Council, and not only go over what we sent them last week, but also, these changes,” Mulder said, “along with maybe these other items that were suggested. Or, do we want to keep it simple for the City Council?”
It was noted by Iacoangeli that because most of the accepted changes were related to grammar and format, that those suggestions could be caught and cleaned up during a “general housekeeping” ordinance that can occur in the first few months after a code is adopted.
“The other things, that are not grammatical though, those read like we are trying to shove something in,” said Commission member Vanessa Warren. “We worked on this for so long. And now there’s a sheet we’re supposed to consider? I think this is something next year’s Planning Commission can consider, but I don’t like the way it looks. In the last two weeks, all of this is coming out? Should we consider it… We did. We did consider it.”
“If City Council wants to kick it back to have the next group look at it, that’s great, but we did so much. We got so much input. So much of what folks saw was not this. We don’t know if this is the majority. I would just like the plan to go to the City Council as is, and if they feel like something needs to be looked at or something is not working, let them come back and have Planning Commission deal with it then,” Warren said.
Commission member Mark Buday added that zoning codes are “living documents.”
“I think having the scope defined is important,” he said, noting that Council should be looking at a clean version of the code, without additional potential memo considerations attached.
“We do have to remember who is paying to have this done. I’ll just leave it at that,” Buday added, saying he felt it was important for the Council to review what was “created by us, the community, for almost three years.”
Buday added it can be emphasized to City Council that there will be a review period of two to three months, which is standard procedure, and that during the review period, Planning Commission can decide what’s important to address.
Bob Buckner, who was reappointed to Planning Commission along with newly appointed City Council member Jeanne Benjamin, also reappointed, at the beginning of the November 20 meeting, said he “could not agree more.”
“I don’t see any exposure or vulnerabilities with any of the things that have been called out here,” he said. “I think we have put a lot of time on this. Let’s give the City Council a clean document. And I’m sure over the course of the first three, four, five, six months of working with the code, there will be other things that surface, and we’re going to want to deal with all of that at the same time.”
“I agree with the team,” said Commission member Barry Lustgarten. “I mean this came in three days ago,” he said of the most recent Wells memo. “I agree with Mark, this is a living document. It’s going to evolve and change. And it would be nice to get the public’s opinion on some of these things, instead of just throwing it at us last minute to make changes.”
The bottom line agreement for most of the Planning Commission was that as a living document, the zoning code will continue to have updates and tweaks in a section or language-basis, and that it was important to send a clean version to the City Council.
“I think all that makes sense,” Benjamin, who is Council’s representative on the Planning Commission, said. She asked Iacoangeli if he would be there when it was presented to Council so that he could “explain anything” she couldn’t explain.
He said yes.
“I think it’s really important for the City Council to understand that the standard procedure here is to, you know, if they choose to adopt it, let it run for three or four months and then have a review process,” Buday added. “So they know they are in their lane, and we are in our lane. As the Planning Commission, this is what we do.”
He added that the City Council should trust that when they get a document back from the Planning Commission, that it has gone through discussion and public review, and that “it’s solid. It’s valid. It’s not a knee jerk reaction.”
Planning Commission member Chip Everest, who was speaking by Zoom, said he was under the impression that Iacoangeli was going to be discussing some of the items in the Wells memo with City Council when he voted to send the zoning ordinance along.
“I do worry there may be some pressure on City Council not to accept our plan, based on some of the more controversial things according to Lynee (Wells). Maybe we don’t care if they decide not to accept it as it is right now,” Everest said.
He cited the size for triggering administrative review as the thing he thinks may draw the most pushback.
Iacoangeli said typically if there is a significant policy difference, City Council remands the ordinance back to Planning Commission for further review.
“Is that mandated in this city?” asked resident Nancy Rondel. “Or do they have the option to move it ahead as they want?”
“They can adopt it with their revisions, but if there is a specific policy change, it should go back to Planning Commission,” Iacoangeli said, adding it would likely be the city attorney’s recommendation that additional public hearings be held if there are significant policy changes.
“Just because Lynee (Wells) raised these issues, doesn’t mean that the work we did to get to where we are today is invalid,” Buckner said.
“I was at the Council meeting Monday night, and Victor (Sinadinoski) did his annual City Council training on what their role is, what our role is, and all the nuances. As I was sitting there I was struck by our conundrum. The role of City Council is to set policy. The role of boards and commissions is to advise. And then the role of city staff is to execute. So what I see is periods, commas, etc. is not policy. We are going to set City Council up for failure if we are going to get into this level of detail.”
“I guess I have to agree. It’s not a perfect world, and things are going to be changed and tweaked, and people have to live a life and move on, and build, and do what they need to do, so this process can continue for people,” Benjamin said. “I guess knowing we have issues to correct over time, you know what needs to be done, and it can all happen. But it’s a lot at one time, and to your point, there’s a lot of other things (budgeting, Capital Improvements Plan, city manager search) going on.”
Commission member Bob Buckner will present the draft zoning ordinance to City Council on December 1, and City Council will hold a public hearing on it December 15.