PRESENTER: Presenter
Christopher J. Looney, AICP, Planning & Development Services Director
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SUBJECT: Title
Presentation and update on the Land Development Ordinance and discussion regarding parking requirements.
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DEPARTMENT: Planning & Development Services Department
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COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: All
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The process for the Land Development Ordinance (LDO) is heavily reliant on public input. Below is a summary of the project steps:
• Initial community surveys
• Initial stakeholder interviews
• Code assessment conducted and report published
• Adoption of a Public Participation Plan
• Establishment of two committees
o TAC - Technical Advisory Committee (staff and utilities)
o CAC - Citizens Advisory Committee (industry and board/commission representatives)
• Interactive webpage with public input tool
• Public input direct email
• Drafting of modules in four steps:
ü Zoning & Districts module
ü Development Standards module
Ø Procedures module
o Signs & Historic Preservation module
With each module:
§ Draft posted to the webpage for interactive comments
§ Public open house
§ Meetings of the TAC and CAC to review
• Consolidated Draft
o Final review and round of public input/meetings
o Adoption process commencement
The draft Procedures Module will be posted to the webpage in the coming weeks. Staff is conducting in-depth work on specific subsections within each module:
Landscaping and Tree Preservation
Using the draft provided by the consultant, staff has made additional revisions to address the goals of the City’s Strategic Plan. The plan goals for Community Identity relate to preserving and increasing green space and tree canopy, protecting natural resources, and safeguarding the character, integrity, and stability of neighborhoods. Staff is working with One Water New Braunfels, Headwaters at the Comal, and NBU on specific items for inclusion, and to align with regulations in the drought ordinance. A draft of this work is being finalized following stakeholder peer review, including input from area landscape architects and arborists, as well as input from the Comal County Master Gardeners and the local branch of the Texas Native Plant Society.
Downtown
City staff is also assisting the consultants in drafting a Form-Based Code for the downtown area. Form-based zoning fosters predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form rather than separation of uses as the organizing principle. Form-based zoning addresses the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks. Cross department staff have come together to assist in developing this innovative zoning. Public involvement is key to a successful Form-Based Code. Initial interaction and feedback from the Downtown Board, plus key stakeholder interviews, have demonstrated support of this effort. Public meetings specific to the form-based code will be held in early Autumn.
Subdivision Platting Design/Access and Circulation
A cross department team is intricately studying these subsections of the Development Standards module. This code component will drive the layout of neighborhoods, street connectivity, cross access for commercial sites, traffic impact analyses requirements, safe mobility, and determine everything from sidewalk construction to terminated vistas.
Restricted Districts
In addition to the 1960s collection and 1980s collection of regular zoning districts in the current Zoning Ordinance, New Braunfels also has approximately 80 additional zoning districts developed between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. They are unique to individual parcels as part of rezoning cases and are referred to as “restricted zoning districts”. Staff is examining the best approach to recommend absorbing them into the new regular districts.
Once completed, each of these above special components will be added to their respective modules online for additional public and committee review and input.
Pre-LDO Amendments
As individual issues have arisen, staff has brought forward incremental code amendments to City Council to 1) sustain momentum for this large and complex LDO project, and 2) solve urgent issues. Each of these will be incorporated into the Consolidated Draft for LDO adoption. Thus far, the individual amendments have:
• Removed barriers to accessory dwelling units (ADUs)
• Corrected a lot size rule that prevented duplexes on lots zoned to allow them
• Adjusted multi-family density in the C-O District
• Clarified rules for temporary storage units
• Clarified certain procedures for historic preservation
• Removed duplicative permits and rules on food trucks and mobile food courts
• Expanded the territory for the Downtown Parking Exemption
• Added a parking study option to create flexibility for minimum parking requirements
• Codified an allowance for more flexible parking for convenience stores, allowing spaces at gas pumps to count toward the required minimums, plus incentives to install electric charging stations.
ISSUE:
Minimum Parking Requirements
At their meeting on May 20, 2024, City Council heard a presentation from staff regarding an individual code amendment proposal to modify off-site shared parking distance maximums. City Council asked staff to examine New Braunfels’ current parking requirements more broadly and identify any opportunities for even more market-driven, demand-based approaches and options, similar to the parking study option having recently been adopted (see above). Some City Council members were also interested in current national trends regarding minimum parking requirement reductions or elimination.
After World War II, individual automobile ownership greatly increased, leading many American cities, including New Braunfels, to adopt use-specific minimum parking requirements modeled on commercial shopping habits of the time. Many of those established minimum requirements are still in place while industry needs and automobile driving habits have evolved. For example, in addition to being developed during American suburban expansion, local government parking requirements predate modern online shopping, online services and societal shifts and opinions about the environment and mobility that are impacting historic American car culture. The result is a national conversation about parking requirements being more contemplative of current shopping and travel habits and movement to more compact development and safe walkable communities.
Downtown
Since the late 1960s, New Braunfels has had some form of parking exception in Downtown. Downtown and areas surrounding it were built before the proliferation of the automobile. Hence, it is a more walkable urban design. Any American city founded prior to the 1940s has a similar downtown development pattern and most of the time, like New Braunfels, does not have parking requirements downtown to sustain and protect that original development pattern. If suburban-style parking requirements applied in a historic or original downtown, businesses might be tempted to demolish historic structures to accommodate parking lots, or other businesses might feel pushed out of downtown due to not being able to meet the parking requirements.
Alternatives
Many cities across the country and the state of Texas have begun modifying their parking requirements. Some have done like New Braunfels and exempted certain areas of town. Some have exempted certain uses. Some have reduced their minimums while others have eliminated minimum requirements altogether. As with all decisions, there are pros and cons to each.
Benefits to lower minimum parking requirements include but are not limited to:
• Making parking tables more consistent with numbers required for a use’s success.
• Opportunities for more green space, landscaping, and tree canopy with the reduction in size of parking lots; reducing urban sprawl and heat island effects.
• Improving stormwater offsets and water quality challenges that often result from unnecessarily large impervious surfaces.
• Opportunities for more buildable area increasing properties’ economic potential and usefulness particularly considering the status of New Braunfels current build-out.
• Reducing obstacles to walkability, ADA accessibility and overall pedestrian movement throughout the city.
• Removing an additional barrier to affordable housing by creating more space to build housing rather than to build extra required parking.
• Encouraging future development and redevelopment to focus more on small walkable/bike-able blocks creating more mixed-use “complete” neighborhoods.
Potential challenges of reduced parking numbers include:
• Ensuring the appropriate adequate number for each use is accurately determined.
• Cities must commit to trend monitoring and routine examination of their parking requirements and be nimble to frequently update the code to evolve with private industry.
Challenges to complete elimination of parking minimums are more significant:
• While the theory is that builders and developers will still install parking even if cities do not require it, to ensure their customers have adequate access to their business; without safeguards it is still possible for builders or developers to take advantage of no parking requirements to save on their construction costs and install zero parking.
• If inadequate or zero parking is installed, parking would invariably be pushed to the curb/on-street aggravating residents and requiring the city to take measures such as increasing “no parking”, “parking by permit”, or “resident only” areas, which comes with cost of added enforcement.
• Loss of the ability to create incentives. For example, codes can include regulatory incentives to achieve certain goals through reduction of requirements - however, if there are no requirements to reduce, then the opportunity for incentivizing does not exist.
A Land Use Fiscal Analysis (LUFA) was recently conducted for the city and presented to City Council on August 19, 2024. In the conclusion, the analysis indicates the city’s current codes and policies should be revised to allow more infill, redevelopment, and mixed-use development. The standards should be improved to ensure it is efficient and cost-effective for developers to build infill and compact development that produces the highest returns on investment for more efficient service delivery; and that ensures the city has a diverse mix of housing that is attractive and affordable to our residents. Lessening key minimum parking requirement numbers where they can be identified as being overly high is one avenue to accomplish the LUFA recommendations.
Initial drafts of the LDO’s Development Standards Module include reduced parking minimums for most uses except for those that have been historically under-parked (doctor’s offices, event centers), have created neighborhood concerns from overflow (tubing outfitters), or have unique demands that can impact abutting neighbors (short-term rentals). Due to the above-noted negatives of complete parking minimum elimination, coupled with the positives of some modification, staff suggests proceeding with reduction as recommended by the LDO consultants. Strategic reductions by use would eliminate outdated computations, bring the parking tables more in-line with what uses need to be successful, simplify requirements, and be in accordance with Envision New Braunfels, the New Braunfels Strategic Plan, the Land Development Ordinance (LDO) Assessment Report, and the recently completed Land Use Fiscal Analysis. All the while still allowing opportunities for regulatory incentives.
An example of how this might look could be:
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN REFERENCE:
• Action 1.3: Encourage balanced and fiscally responsible land use patterns.
• Action 1.5: Promote economic centers by ensuring adequate parking for people to visit businesses/restaurants/shops.
• Action 1.6: Incentivize infill development and redevelopment to take advantage of existing infrastructure.
• Action 1.11: Update policies and codes to achieve development patterns that implement the goals of this plan.
• Action 2.33: Encourage vertical growth and development of key areas to take advantage of infrastructure capacity, maintain the core, and to discourage sprawl.
• Action 3.6: Pro-actively provide a regulatory environment that remains business and resident friendly.
• Action 3.10: Change zoning/land use and platting rules, and create tax and permit fee incentives in underutilized neighborhoods, nodes, and corridors to encourage redevelopment.
• Action 3.19: Improve walkability across town to attract younger generations seeking pedestrian connections.
• Action 3.31: Adopt policies and ordinances supportive of workforce housing, creating opportunities that make investment in workforce housing more feasible for private and nonprofit developers.
• Action 5.6: Implement measures to achieve and maintain a high National Flood Insurance Program CRS rating to ensure the safety of all residents and to reduce property owner flood insurance rates.
• Action 7.8: Enhance pedestrian quality of the City by limiting the realm of the automobile.
STRATEGIC PLAN REFERENCE:
☒Economic Mobility ☐Enhanced Connectivity ☒Community Identity
☐Organizational Excellence ☒Community Well-Being ☐N/A
• Objective: Incentivize mixed-use developments and redevelopments in targeted locations to create a built environment with integrated housing, commercial centers, and opportunities for improved connectivity.
• Objective: Develop capital and staffing investments that improve safety, reduce heat islands, and encourage transportation modes that support healthier lifestyles and exercise such as biking, walking and running.
FISCAL IMPACT:
Lessening outdated minimum parking requirements will allow more flexibility for development and redevelopment, making it possible to increase the sales and property tax base and enhance return on investment for more efficient service delivery as recommended in the Land Use Fiscal Analysis recently conducted for the City.