Legacy Ordinance is a Moving Target
At last night’s University Park City Council meeting, city staff broke down the list of “minor adjustments” proposed by Legacy Hillcrest Investments and how they would affect the development standards already outlined by the council for the Chase Bank site at Daniel and Hillcrest avenues.
Parking capacity remains a key issue with the development. City staff and Legacy worked to develop a new parking methodology (a word that was used in just about every sentence at last night’s council meeting) that would allow the developer to reduce the number of parking spaces in the development.
Max Fuqua, one of Snider Plaza’s most persistent parking advocates, said that declaring the project as “mixed-use” in order to allocate fewer parking spaces to the development was fallacious. He said that the project, by his standards, isn’t even a mixed-use development because it doesn’t incorporate a residential component.
“It’s a concrete fact that we don’t know the allocation of uses in this project,” Fuqua said, prior to yesterday’s meeting. “We don’t know if there’s going to be a restaurant; we don’t know if there’s going to be a gym.”
Legacy Hillcrest’s Preston V. Phillips made it clear that, until a detailed site plan is created designating specific uses in the development, a parking plan in alignment with the city’s existing standards would be impractical, if not impossible.
Phillips said that Legacy does not have a clear idea of what mix of uses the development would incorporate, but they are looking to bring in a “high-end salon” along with restaurant and retail.
For more details, pick up a copy of Park Cities People this Friday.
I sure would like to see a well-done, really in-depth history of the issues surrounding this property. Is it purely a zoning change issue that has exploded into something more controversial? Do Snider Plaza merchants sense some ability to extract some extra parking? From my naivety, it doesn’t seem like a tough problem. There is a specific zoning ordinance for that property. They should be able to build whatever they want within the existing ordinance. What does a library, or a restaurant, or a salon, or SP parking have to do with it?
I just honestly don’t know, and would love to see a great PCP article on this topic.