City council rejects development on Ronald W. Reagan
City council rejects development on Ronald W. Reagan
Written by Kara Vaught Friday, 20 June 2008
On April 17, the Leander City Council rejected a zoning request 5-2 from KB Homes for the proposed Winding Creek subdivision on 268.52 acres at the southeast corner of Ronald W. Reagan Boulevard and RM 2243.
Council members Kirsten Lynch and John Perez were the two dissenting votes.
During the meeting, mayor John Cowman and council member Vic Villarreal spoke against the 50-foot lot size of about half the homes.
“I’m not a fan of 50-foot lots,” Villarreal said later. “I think it shortchanges people. I have a 55-foot lot and I hate it.”
Council member David Siebold voiced concern about the concentration of the 50-foot lot homes on in one area of the subdivision, something which David Hutton, Leander planning director, said conflicts with the composite zoning ordinance’s goal of creating sustainable neighborhoods.
“I don’t think the rejection was an outright rejection of 50-foot lots; it was that the community didn’t have enough integration,” Hutton said. “Rather than divide our neighborhoods, we like to try to provide a healthy mixture of different lot sizes and housing opportunities in the same neighborhood. It allows people, as their housing need change over their lifetime to stay in the same neighborhood.”
The rejection of the development was called devastating by members of the Reagan-Parmer Corridor Association, a group of landowners and members of the business community with a stated objective of spurring development along Ronald W. Reagan Boulevard.
The swath of land in question is not served by city utilities, and KB Homes had planned to install the lines necessary for those services.
Scott Cannon, a landowner along Ronald Reagan, told the council before the vote it would be tragic for him if the KB Homes deal was denied.
“We have a business in Georgetown that we want to move to Leander in the TOD [transit-oriented development], but we need to sell the 120 acres we have had for sale. We have had agreements with developers to sell medium-high-end homes on that property, and three times they’ve put non-refundable money up, and three times those deals were killed for lack of infrastructure: sewer and water and Leander’s inability to provide those to us.”
Since the zoning rejection, Riverside Resources, the commercial real estate investment and development firm that was partnering with KB Homes to develop it, has hired Planned Environments Inc. to create a new master plan for the site.
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