The Summit County Council has been working for months on a proposed neighborhood mixed-use (NMU) zone, and it looks like lawmakers will have to get it to the finish line by working in tandem with another planning process.
At the council’s last discussion on the NMU zone, Councilor Chris Robinson wondered how a neighboring property is impacted if a mixed-use project goes up right next to it, with heights allowed up to 45 feet.
Councilor Roger Armstrong said he agrees with the concern. He said the council will address that with a paster plan development (MPD) process.
“And that’s where they start to sketch out, with more specificity, the wheres and the whats and the widths and the setbacks and heights and parking and all of the details that are gonna make this project work or not work,” he said. “And it’s largely discretionary for the county. The more bells and whistles and requirements that we put in either the NMU or the MPD, the more locked in we are to those things.”
Armstrong said he thinks the NMU zone is heading toward an approval, but some issues such as density still need to be worked out.
“Density is generally not something we articulate with any kind of specificity as it relates to commercial development,” he said. “So that density is limited by the setbacks, by the available space to actually put a building in, the heights, the widths, the setbacks, the amount of land available. Here, because it’s mixed-use, we’re looking at including affordable-housing in that mix. And I think that I’d like to make sure that we think that through carefully before we approve something that could result in a modicum of retail and commercial operations and then a massive residential development.”
Armstrong said it’s likely they will approve a mixed-use zone and an MPD process in tandem.