OCTOBER 22, 2009 ISSUE
Boone 2030 Land Use Master Plan Adopted—What’s Next?
After more than two years in the making, a land use master plan for the Town of Boone was unanimously adopted by the Boone Town Council October 15. The plan, titled “Boone 2030: The Smart Growth Plan for the Heart of the High Country,” will serve as a guide for development and redevelopment in Boone over the next 20 years.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Council Member Stephen Phillips in his motion to adopt the plan.
The land use master plan is considered a nonbinding blueprint for the town’s 2006 Comprehensive Plan and will work together with other plans and programs to provide for Boone’s long-range growth, facility and service needs. The plan aims to provide a general pattern for the location, distribution and character of future land uses within Boone’s growth area.
“It’s a milestone plan that the town has undertaken,” said Jane Shook, a town planner. “Like any plan, it is a guiding document that will impact the regulatory documents that are created.
“It is a change of direction [from] what we’re currently going in,” she added.
Committing to Smart Growth
Conversations about adopting a smart growth approach to planning in Boone began several years ago. Smart growth seeks to avoid urban sprawl by concentrating growth and redevelopment within a city instead of building outward. The town hired The Lawrence Group to conduct a Smart Growth Audit of Boone in 2007, which found that the current Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), adopted in 1997, is not accomplishing the goals of the Comprehensive Plan. The Lawrence Group recommended that the town develop a sustainable land use master plan.
In October 2008, The Lawrence Group facilitated a weeklong public planning charrette to gather input for the plan, and the planning and design firm published a draft of the document in March. Several public hearings and meetings on the plan have been held since then.
“I think the most exciting thing about the land use plan is it did incorporate a lot of public input,” Shook said.
The 118-page document has 77 specific recommendations for action and includes a Framework Plan to serve as a development and redevelopment policy map, transportation network enhancements and a multi-modal concept plan, a retrofit plan for key suburban corridors, conceptual planning in three dimensions for key locations in various contexts, an urban design/urban infill plan for downtown and surrounding neighborhoods and strategic initiatives for environmental sustainability, affordable housing, historic preservation and other community priorities.
What’s Next?
“The next steps of course will be bringing our regulatory documents and all of our other plans so that they complement one another,” Shook said.
With 77 recommended implementation items, the town has a lot of work ahead to achieve the goals of the land use master plan. One major undertaking will be the overhaul of the UDO.
Before Development Services—the town planning department—can begin rewriting the UDO, however, the Town Council has to decide whether to adopt the land use master plan’s recommended Framework Plan.
The Framework Plan is a departure from traditional zoning classifications that are based on use, such as Central Business or Residential. The Framework Plan divides land into six separate classifications or “sectors,” from the most natural to the most urbanized areas. The sectors are O-1, Preserved Open Space; O-2, Reserved/Conservation Lands; G-1, Low Density/Primarily Residential; G-2, Urban Neighborhoods; G-3, Mixed-Use Centers/Corridors; and G-4, Downtown Boone. For the broader sector classifications, development can be further subdivided based on “transect zones,” or from least to most density.
In addition, the Framework Plan would be implemented through documents called form-based codes, which contain less text than conventional zoning codes and are richly illustrated to depict the desired urban form and spatial relationships desired by the community. Form-based codes focus less on uses in buildings and more on the massing, character and scale of the buildings themselves, as well as the design of adjacent urban spaces.
Shook said Development Services is researching the options of adopting the new Framework Plan and form-based codes, developing a hybrid code that would use some information from the existing UDO and some information from a form-based code or using a supplementary code that is more form-based in nature.
That decision should be before the council fairly soon, she said.
The action recommendation for rewriting the UDO and revising the town zoning map is scheduled to take place through 2014 in the land use master plan, but Shook said the time needed to rewrite the UDO will depend on which type of code the town chooses to use.
“It’s hard to estimate,” she said. “It depends on how much will be changed.”
Examples of other action recommendations include increasing minimum open space requirements, establishing an energy task force and developing a renewable energy plan, advocating for the preferred alternative to Daniel Boone Parkway through the Bamboo Road area, conducting a parking study for downtown, developing a downtown master plan, establishing park-and-ride facilities and promoting infill development in vacant structures downtown, among many others.
To view the land use master plan, click to www.townofboone.net and select “Land Use Master Plan Information” or visit Boone Town Hall, located at 567 West King Street. For more information, call 828-268-6200.
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