Episode 11: The Inside Scoop On The County's New Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Ordinances

Jefferson County recently adopted a new Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Ordinances (you can view them both here). Hear from the Director of Development Services Josh Johnson and Zoning Administrator Michael Morrison about how these were developed (not in a vacuum) and how they will be implemented moving forward. To see both the Comprehensive Plan and the Zoning ordinances, visit JCCAl.org >Departments>Development Services, or click on the link above.

Have an idea for a County podcast? Contact the Director of Public Information, Helen Hays at haysh@jccal.org

Transcript

Speaker 0:12

Welcome everybody to the Jefferson County Podcast for the People. I'm your host this week, Helen Hayes, I'm the Director of Public Information. And with me today, I've got Josh Johnson. He is the Director of Development Services. And we have Michael Morrison, zoning administrator Extraordinaire. We're adding that extraordinaire to your title now, Michael. I think it's so appropriate.

Speaker 1 0:36

Works for me.

Speaker 0:37

All right. Thanks for joining us. So a lot has been happening in y'all's universe. You recently have gotten passed and approved the new comprehensive plan. And to couple with that, some zoning changes and some updated zoning ordinances. So I just wanted to walk citizens through what all this means and how long have we been working on this. It's taken some time. And I think we've been very thoughtful and deliberate in the process. So, Josh, walk us through what the timeline has been through getting this new comprehensive plan.

Speaker 2 1:18

Well, it's uh it's definitely been a long effort and an extensive effort on our county commission's part and then also on our staff's part in terms of getting this thing across the goal line. the process began several years ago when we had kickoff meetings. There was the consultant that we had, they did a lot of discovery and initial examination of the socioeconomic data within the county, and a lot of that gets reflected in the plan and the recommendations. But, yeah, it's been several years of effort. It included multiple rounds of public involvement meetings, online surveys, meeting with individual cities within the county. I believe we met with all the cities within the county except maybe five or six, which is was a very large lift,, just to make sure that we incorporate our planning efforts with theirs and that they support one another. And, yeah, just going back and presenting the plan online, allowing for public comment in accordance with the state statutes. So, yeah, it's it's been several years. you know, we just recently got it adopted a couple months ago.

Speaker 2:22

And so what does this allow for? It doesn't mean that we're gonna go out and build neighborhoods and things like that, because the county doesn't do that, but it does provide some better guidelines for people who want to come in and do developments, right?

Speaker 2 2:40

Yeah, so the the the comp plan in some ways is kind of broad, big picture. Now it does drill down into specific regional community areas that we thought were high focus, such as Forestale, McCalla, the mining communities around Highway 269. And, but yeah, it doesn't go in and say, hey, the county's building this, the county's doing that. It's visionary in terms of saying what we will allow, what we want to see. There are some action steps, there's an implementation part of that that you know outlines the type of grants we may want to go for, what is the strategy for implementing the comprehensive plan? That's all in there. You know, the plan doesn't do any good if it just sits up on a shelf and it's not practical, can't be implemented. So that's where we're at with that. And and as Michael will touch on briefly here in a second, the zoning ordinance is where the comp plan may be the the what and the why, the zoning ordinance is the how. So that sets the guidelines and the regulations for us to allow development and then also in some ways kind of induce and indirectly implement the comp plan.

Speaker 3:48

That's really great. That's a good good explanation. So, Michael, and it's a great transition to you with zoning. And I know we've watched in commission meetings zoning cases come before the commission,, especially some residential areas, McCalla. What do these new zoning ordinances provide for? What what's changed?

Speaker 1 4:11

Well, what we've done is we've gone back and we've looked at what the main focus was and and what the issues were around why it was that we needed to change some things. It all comes back to housing and providing quality housing, providing adequate housing, providing a variety of housing options. And so what has happened is we've gone through and we've sort of created a catalog for anyone who wants to develop property for them to choose, you know, from a wide variety of housing options and two with the designations in the comprehensive plan, provide those sort of housing options where appropriate, where there's adequate infrastructure, where you have access to things like, you know, uh neighborhood services, to interstate access, also in planning for um future development around the northern belt line when it's appropriate to develop up there. And then also we've done some things to ease some restrictions that we had in the zoning warrants at the time by allowing things like accessory dwelling units, granny flats, guest houses, those sorts of things. We used to allow them, it was it was a sort of a cumbersome process by which you had to go through the county board of zoning adjustment and get some sort of approval. Now these things are just allowed by right, and people can apply for those at any point in time. I mean, and so like I said, going back, it's just it was trying to address the need for quality housing in appropriate areas. And so I think that that's what the zoning ordinance is trying to accomplish and putting it out there for developers to have a lot of options to choose from, and then again go through the process, and that process involves a lot more review by the Planning and Zoning Commission and increasing things like lot sizes, the way that garages are arranged, so that we can get those sort of quality housing developments within the county.

Speaker 5:53

And housing is really important in the county, especially as you get into some of the outlying areas, and we want to provide more and quality affordable housing. So um, you know, and there's a potential for mixed-use developments and all those types of things. And so I think this is going to be really good for developers who want to come in, right? Because it gives them guidelines and then it also kind of protects how that development is done.

Speaker 1 6:21

Oh, yes. I mean, we we've done some things to again increase lot sizes so that you know there's more space in between the housing themselves, as well as rearrange or or encouraging the rearrangement of how we think about the concepts of garages., As far as doing things with rental housing, there's not really a lot that local governments can do without coming into interference with the Fair Housing Act with regards to that. Right. But the hope and the goal is to have the developer a market where you've got these quality houses that are out there that it doesn't make sense to rent. We're just hoping for things to pick up with the market and the housing market and and interest rates and everything else to encourage those those home buyers to get out there and invest within their own properties within the county. And then, too, you know, you've got a lot of people who are downsizing.

Speaker 7:09

Yeah. Anyway, thanks for that explanation. And so is the process still the same for any anybody who has a zoning change or whatever coming through the zoning and commission. Has anything changed with that?

Speaker 1 7:23

Right. the only changes that were made, if they're doing some sort of plan development, a large-scale plan development, they have to go through a committee hearing of the planning and zoning commission prior to making application. And , I mean, we've had that procedure in place for planned unit development districts. It's just that now we have a whole catalog of planned development districts that follow that same sort of process.

Speaker 7:47

Excellent. And that should make it better for the developer as well, right?

Speaker 1 7:52

Right, right, exactly, exactly. And you know, it's it's it's all about encouraging again that that quality housing product that we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 8:01

Well, great. So for the future of this, Josh, you said the comprehensive plan sitting on a shelf doesn't help anybody if it just sits there, right? So what's gonna come what's gonna come next?

Speaker 2 8:17

Yeah, so we're through the you know adoption, the zoning ordinance, which was the the first big major hurdle in terms of implementing the comp comprehensive plan, because that kind of gives us the structure, as Michael said. And our next steps that we're trying to look at is actually going back out to the communities,, particularly the ones that we would consider focus areas like Forest dale and McCalla, maybe around the Mount Olive area and Highway 269, kind of take the approach of saying, okay, this is this was the findings of the comprehensive plan. This is what we feel like is specific to your area, and not to overburden them with you know planning efforts, but to get something, maybe another plan that's a little more specific just to their community, and then go in and proactively see if we need to change zoning in certain areas to meet the goals of the plan. So the intermediary set, which we really didn't touch on between the comprehensive plan and the zoning ordinance, was the adoption of a land use map. And that sort of spatially goes through and says, we feel like the highest and best use for this parcel is such and such. And, you know, all that's kind of driven by infrastructure, growth you know, the development that's around that area. And then, you know, some of it's qualitative in terms of us trying to make sure that we're providing for things like food deserts and mitigating, you know, the loss of basically mitigating the public health risk of folks not having access to grocery stores, pharmacies, and things like that. So we tried to take a gap analysis approach of that as well. in addition to that, going into proactively re-rezoning those areas, we want to work with economic development in terms of trying to attract the right employment into areas that are, you know, that need it, that where we have you know blotted areas, that we have you know, a need for kind of turning the community around, higher wages, higher number of jobs for population growth and income decline. And then also, you know, looking at grant opportunities in areas, infrastructure improvements, that can look from everything from sidewalks to roundabouts, which the county's done in the past, multi-use paths, all that is is mobility and moving people is moving money, and moving money is economic development.

Speaker 10:25

Absolutely. And I want to be clear on this. So when it comes to you know economic development and this comprehensive plan, we talk about you met with all the cities within the county, but this comprehensive plan really applies to unincorporated parts of the county, correct?

Speaker 2 10:43

Yes, correct. Now, now areas to your point, Helen, which is a good one, you know, areas where we have unincorporated parcels that are, you know, more or less surrounded by places like like Hoover, that for whatever reason those individuals didn't want to annex or Hoover didn't want them to annex, you know, for all intents and purposes, that's really within the city of Hoover. They're probably within Hoover's um fire district and their police PJ. And so we really don't want to try and reinvent the wheel in those communities, and we want to make sure that we're deferring to what what the city has planned for the areas within the city around the unincorporated parcels,, and make sure that we're not in conflict with that because we we do we have a lot of parcels over, particularly over the mountain, that are still unincorporated that are surrounded by cities. So that was critical to that piece.

Speaker 11:33

Yeah, it that it adds that extra layer of complication.

Speaker 2 11:37

Correct, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11:39

It does with services as well. It's hard for you've got those pockets that are surrounded by by cities. Yeah. So if people want to take a look at these plans and the zoning,, these guys are on all this information is on your webpage, right?

Speaker 2 11:55

Correct, yes, it's on our um development services webpage within the the county commission's website.

Speaker 11:59

Okay, great. Well, we will link to that in the show notes for the podcast. Is there anything else that I didn't touch on today that you guys want to make sure that our citizens know with this plan and how we're trying to move things forward?

Speaker 2 12:14

Yeah, you know, I think, and Michael can probably agree, zoning and land use development is a give and take. And that's really what we tried to do is take a nuanced approach with the comprehensive plan and the zoning ordinance. You know, we realize there's a housing shortage in Jefferson County just like there's a housing shortage across the country,. And that's attributed to a variety of different reasons. We've been blessed in Jefferson County to have high employment growth. And, you know, for whatever reason, it's it's faster to create jobs than it is to create the labor housing that meets those needs, that meets that job. So that's where we're trying to be at. and we wanted to make sure that we want to allow for you know the right residential density in right places around employment centers, interstate interchanges, you know, activity centers, industrial parks,, major thoroughfares, and not take a scatter shot approach to meeting the housing shortage of just doing subdivisions in between cow pastures and you know, really just suburban sprawl in a lot of ways. And make sure that it's a quality build that has enough, that has common space and park space, and it's built with durable materials and has good connectivity. And isn't that just sort of typical suburban development that's not in the right context?

Speaker 13:32

Yeah, I remember one commission meeting where we had the woman who was living in her house and the property next to her was agriculture, and she had a problem with the person who owned that property, their cows and their horses. You know, and we and we sat there and we, you know, the commission listened to them debate it for a good you know 30 to 40 minutes or so and showing pictures of the cows. So yeah, you know, that that we you know, we laugh about it, but that's a serious thing. It is that person looking in that.

Speaker 2 14:06

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 14:07

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14:08

Um, Michael, any last thoughts from you?

Speaker 1 14:12

No, we're just now that we've got all this in place, we're just ready to roll. So looking forward to implementing this and getting it off the ground and bringing some quality development to the county.

Speaker 14:22

All right. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to be with me today and kind of explain this more in depth than you can in a social media post or maybe what's been in an interview. And I know in the commission meetings, Josh, you presented and we can link what that comprehensive plan was and all the thought that went into it. You did a really thorough presentation for commissioners in the in the pre-commission meeting, so we can link to that as well. But anyway, thank you guys for joining us for the podcast for the people. And if anybody has any um topics they would like for us to address on the podcast, we always like to hear your suggestions. You can email those to me at Hayes, that's H-A-Y-S-H at JCAL.org. That's my email address. And we will um listen to you next time on the podcast for the people.

Speaker 2 15:16

Thank you for having us.