About 20 residents on both sides of the issue spoke Thursday at a public hearing on Columbus' proposed first major zoning overhaul in decades as City Council moves toward a final vote next month.
Council President Pro Tem Rob Dorans, who has led the rezoning effort in Council, told The Dispatch after the hearing that councilmembers are preparing to make changes to Mayor Andrew J. Ginther's proposal to rezone over 12,000 parcels along major city corridors to encourage more housing development. It is unclear how deeply those changes would cut into the mayor's plan to allow taller buildings with no parking requirements in large swaths of the city.
The final proposal will be unveiled within weeks at a public hearing, putting the plan on a course for a potential vote by the end of July, Dorans said.
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Map of parcels questioned
Questions continued, including from council members, about how the final map of parcels was crafted — supplemented with an opinion from City Attorney Zach Klein's office suggesting that it's too late to change the map.
"I'm hoping that we could just talk very briefly a little bit about how we got here with the maps," said Councilmember Melissa Green.
Green noted that many of her Hilltop neighbors questioned why West Broad Street — a predominately commercial corridor that is first in line to potentially receive LinkUs "bus rapid transit" service from the Central Ohio Transit Authority — would be predominately zoned "urban general," allowing buildings of only up to four stories. Some Hilltop residents think buildings could be higher, she said.
While large tracts of Route 161 aren't included in the denser rezoning, Councilmember Emmanuel Remy said he has been a behind-the-scenes champion of "including 161 because (it's) the corridor to one of the greatest job opportunities (Intel) that this region has ever seen ... and certainly one that needs a stimulus."
But city General Counsel Lara Baker-Morrish unveiled a legal opinion at the meeting that addressed the question of whether the proposed map could still be changed. "Provisions of the City Code as well as due process requirements do not support adding parcels or properties," the opinion said. It also prohibits changing the intensity of the current "Zone In" parcels to a higher level, Baker-Morrish informed the meeting.
The reason? City Council unanimously passed an ordinance on March 25 requiring a 60-day public comment period. It also required two public hearings on the identified 12,300 parcels, although it noted that there is no specified language that those must take place within the 60 days. The March changes also prohibit any of the Zone In parcel owners from opting out of the new code requirements in the future.
Asked after the meeting what would have to happen for the Council to change the map, Baker-Morrish said the public comment clock would have to be reset to tick off another 60 days, with two more hearings. Nearby property owners would also need to be notified of any updates to the map, she said.
The legal opinion states that such a move "would delay the legislative adoption of the Zone-In transition until at least mid-August," or by a couple of weeks over the current schedule.
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Monica Tuttle, zoning chair of the Northwest Civic Association, suggested that even taking seven more months to get the plan right would be appropriate given the multi-year effort to adopt what city officials have called the first major zoning overhaul in some 70 years.
"We've heard from the City Attorney's office that it would require additional notification," Tuttle said. "OK, so then we 'notice' people. So then we incorporate that feedback and we make sure that these are the right steps that we are taking.
"We've heard a lot about NIMBYs and YIMBYs, (but) the thing I haven't heard from is people saying, 'Yes, I want to live in that building. Yes I want to live on that parcel, in that mixed-use space, where there is a gas station at one end, and my apartment is at the other end.' "
Others, including several architects, voiced strong support for moving forward quickly with the changes, citing the housing affordability crisis in Columbus.
"I'm a huge supporter of this effort, because it will expand both the number of housing units as well as the diversity of housing," said Michael Wilkos, vice president of community engagement at United Way of Central Ohio, who was speaking as a longtime city resident. "Our current zoning code does not support housing that aligns with who we have become."
Others at Thursday's hearing said word of the massive zoning changes still hasn't filtered out to the bulk of the community, even though a final vote is only weeks away. Vicki Boggs, 68, of Clintonville, attended the meeting to urge Council to hit the brakes, saying she just found out about the plan a few weeks ago.
"I've spoken to at least probably 30 or more neighbors. No one knew about this," Boggs said. "No one."
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