News

City dumps public review of some development

By Bill Moss, Published: June 11, 2015

In what it described as an effort to streamline land-use regulations, the Hendersonville City Council eliminated Planning Board review of mid-sized development projects that don’t require rezoning.

After a lengthy discussion over two meetings, the council last week agreed that building plans between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet will be reviewed and approved only by the planning staff, not the Planning Board. Previously, buildings less than 10,000 square feet needed staff review only.
The Planning Board and City Council have been responding to concerns the local business community has raised about the city’s development regulations. The idea of eliminating time-consuming reviews by the Planning Board came from the city’s new Business Advisory Council.
If the streamlining was intended to please the pro-development group, it may have backfired. The most influential advocate for business criticized the move for giving too much power to city Planning Director Sue Anderson.
Larry Rogers“The Business Advisory Committee had suggested the City find ways to streamline the commercial permitting process to make it less expensive to build,” Larry Rogers, executive director of the Partnership for Economic Progress, wrote in an April newsletter to PEP members. “What the City Planner came up with was a rewrite of the City ordinance to give her, the City Planner, total discretion of approval of a commercial project up to 20,000 square feet with no oversight. This suggestion would allow the Planner to approve or disapprove a project without the Planning Board or any public individual hearing about it.”
The City Council decided last week that it does want the public to know that a new building is going up, even in cases when the current zoning allows it. When a property owner submits a site plan for a new building on a parcel that already has the proper zoning, the planning department will put up signs and be ready to answer questions.
“They will see these bright yellow notices and they can call us,” Anderson said. “The City Council was concerned that at least the public had some knowledge that something is happening.”
In the past five years about a dozen developments would have avoided Planning Board review had the new standard been in place. Among those are five drug stores — three CVS stores and two Walgreen’s stores.