Piqua Tables Controversial Housing Plan
A Three Hour Meeting Focuses on a New Housing Development
Earlier this month, this publication discussed a new housing development going through the process of being approved by the Piqua City Commission. The plan would create lots that would allow for over 200 single family residences and 132 mutli-family housing units, such as town homes.
The Commission held a nearly three hours meeting earlier this week in front of a packed house of concerned residents, with the two resolutions dealing with this housing development taking center stage. One of the resolutions would have created the preliminary plan for the development, while the second resolution would have changed the zoning for a more dense development.
Most of the residents that came up to speak were rightly concerned. And the concerns these residents brought forward were wide and varied. Residents were concerned about storm runoff, the design of the cul-de-sacs and traffic flow (which also has city staff concerned), emergency service response times, on-street parking, school overcrowding, property values, quality of the builder. The City Commission listened to these concerns and promised to get answers to many of the residents questions.
To make it sound like the meeting was just three hours of contentious back and forth, between the builder, developer, city staff and residents would not be accurate. In fact, the discussion was started with a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation offered by the City’s Community Services Director, Kyle Hinkleman.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
And while a twenty-minute presentation on the project may sound like a waste of time, it was not. Mr. Hinkleman did an outstanding job of talking about the project and provided answers to the questions he was given from residents. More than that, he talked in a clear and plain-spoken way about the development process and how the city’s 2007 Comprehensive Plan and the Development Code work together to allow for development while protecting the community. He talked about the process to get a project approved, from the Planning Commission to the City Commission.
Rarely have I seen city staff explain a complicated process in such a helpful fashion. Local government bureaucrats, often enmeshed in these arcane processes, often fail to think about how local residents are often working at a disadvantage when they have concerns about the decision-making happening in their own hometown.
Not knowing the intricacies of these processes doesn’t necessarily make the average resident “stupid” (though there are plenty of bureaucrats who think that way), it simply means that local governments should do a better job of explaining how these procedures work in real time. Believe it or not, even elected officials don’t even fully understand these processes. Mr. Hinkleman took the time to explain the processes in play, and he deserves a ton of credit.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Residents want assurances that important decisions aren’t made in a rushed fashion and that their concerns are heard and understood. And one of the concerns that was brought forward is that the two legislative actions were resolutions and not ordinances.
This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but that is not entirely accurate. In Piqua’s charter system, resolutions do not need to go through a three-reading process. Resolutions can simply be adopted at the same meeting that they are brought up. Ordinances, on the other hand, have a three-reading rule, deliberating preventing a quick decision.
Resolutions are local government actions that truly keep the wheels of government running. Purchases and contracts are often the things that make up local government resolutions. Ordinances are more permanent actions of local government. New laws and regulations are often codified as ordinances, and in many places so are zoning amendments. Perhaps having zoning amendments and preliminary and final plats treated as Ordinances is something the City of Piqua should consider, guaranteeing a deliberative process for the community.
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How helpful to have 2 completely different examples of how city administration interacts with their community. Seriously though, this sounds night and day different than what happened on 10/16 in Troy.