City invites Greenland residents to discuss land-use proposals
Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008
Greenland passed its master land-use and street plans a month ago and is now taking the next step.
Greenland Mayor John Gray said that the public is invited to a public hearing at 6 p.m. Sept. 29 at the community center to look at the new land-use plan and start suggesting areas the city should consider rezoning.
Gray said it was one of two options the city has at the moment. The first one is to rezone the entire city to fit the new land-use plan.
“That would produce people with pitch forks and torches,” Gray joked.
The second option is to look at areas that are considered what Gray called “problem” areas that need rezoning immediately and work toward achieving that.
“We’d like to ask the public where their concerns are,” Gray said.
The council heard from several experts at its regularly scheduled Monday night meeting where the options were presented. Gray said the public hearing was the direction the group opted to go.
Celia Scott-Silkwood, a regional planner with the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, said that Greenland has a lot of work to do toward its future and every step along the way will require public hearings. She added that there’s no exact blueprint for planning a city’s future.
“There’s no normal, some (cities) have done it bit by bit and some have amended their zoning map to include their new zones altogether,” she said.
Scott-Silkwood said Greenland planning commissioners have to specify what each level of zoning includes. She said that means defining the different districts, like what type of facility and building can go in C 1 or C 2 zoning for example.
A year and six months ago the City Council passed a moratorium on residential development. Six months later it put another moratorium on commercial development. The passage of both moratoriums gave the city a window of time to come up with master land-use and street plans to assure the city saw logical, planned growth. On Aug. 11 the council lifted both moratoriums, freeing the city to take the next step.
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