Hutto's smart growth plan

Hutto's smart growth plan

By Beth Wade Friday, 10 October 2008

City staff hire consultants to create a Unified Development Code to simplify city ordinances.

Traditional city design, with houses and shopping generally separated because of zoning restrictions, is evolving as city planners look for ways to include more multiuse developments and incorporate a variety of housing, commercial and retail options for residents into the city.

Like neighboring cities Leander and Georgetown, Hutto is creating a Unified Development Code, a document that contains all of the city’s development guidelines and ordinances.

The city currently has many ordinances with often contradictory language, but through the UDC process, the city will be able to simplify and streamline the code.

The UDC and SmartCode Overlay, which allows the city to be more flexible with developers, uses the market as its guide, rather than the city’s land use map and predetermined zones.

“Instead of saying this lot has to be commercial, it would allow you — as long as you build your building up to the street edge and provide adequate parking — to start out with office space if that is all that the market would support,” Hutto Community Development Director Matthew Lewis said. “Once the market reaches a higher dollar tax value, then it would support a higher density, which would lead to a restaurant or commercial [development].”

PlaceMakers

In March the city hired PlaceMakers, a national city planning firm, to help with the process of redeveloping the code and to create the new SmartCode Overlay.

Lewis said the city chose PlaceMakers because the firm calibrates each code to fit the city’s needs, rather than using a template code applied to every city.

“This won’t be a one size fits all [document],” said Ben Brown, PlaceMakers principal. “The process that we go through, we call calibrated, which means adjusting the template for form-based coding to match the individual place.”

The emphasis in the code is to create the city Hutto would like to grow into by developing an identity, Brown said.

During the early stages of the UDC, the city held roundtable discussions with developers to give the city direction on what they want to see included in the code, Lewis said.

“We heard over and over again — and this is very common in communities — that [developers] want a predictable process,” Brown said. “They want to know if they bring their plans in, how long it will take them, what the rules are and what they can expect in the process.”

The firm, along with city planners, has analyzed all of the city’s current development ordinances to determine where and if there are any conflicting codes in place that can be detrimental to development, said Susan Henderson, a PlaceMakers principal.

PlaceMakers and city staff are in the process of creating a draft of the code.

The UDC will allow the city to revise its development ordinances — including zoning, sign, subdivision, historic preservation, fence and landscaping — into one document that will remove any conflicting wording and modernize the ordinances.

New ordinances will also be introduced into the code to address issues such as rainwater harvesting and a new form of developmental ordinance known as a SmartCode Overlay.

Smart coding

The overlay is part of a trend in city planning to create a form-based code that has been going on in the development community for nearly 20 years, Brown said. The idea has many different names, including new urbanist, mixed-use or walkable, traditional neighborhoods, Brown said.

Unlike having a series of codes to define building uses, the SmartCode focuses on addressing the look of a building, and offering the city a way to define the city’s future development and make it cohesive.

“The code we create allows Hutto to grow into itself,” Brown said. “Hutto can then grow into its own image of its best character.”

Lewis said the city’s SmartCode will apply to the entire city, but will only be a mandatory code in some areas, such as the Gateway Overlay District that is at the entry points to the city near Hwy. 79, Toll 130 and FM 685. In other places, developers will have the option to participate. Whether or not there will be incentives and what those incentives will be for SmartCode participation has yet to be decided, Lewis said.

To help create the code, the city will host a charrette, a series of meetings in which community members work with a design team composed of town planners, architects, landscape architects, traffic engineers, illustrators and coding experts to define a collective vision for a region.

“Right now, there are so many people who have vested interest in the process, and often when a place is growing very fast, they don’t have time to sit down and work out the potential disagreements between one another. They just tend to their own territory,” Brown said.

The charrette will give the community a chance to sit down at the table and discuss how it would like to see Hutto develop.

During the charrette, Nov. 3-7 at the Holiday Inn Express, 323 Ed Schmidt Blvd., residents will have the opportunity to give input to PlaceMakers and city staff about the code. Renderings and illustrations will be available to show what the coding could look like in the city.

The SmartCode will be added to the UDC document, but before it can go into effect, the council must approve the entire ordinance. Lewis expects the process to be completed early next year. For information on the city’s code, visit www.gainingfromgrowth.com.