The East Side Planning Commission, at their last meeting, got an update on the study process that’s been underway for over a year, on the Cedar Crest Village Overlay plan in Hoytsville.
The East Side Planning Commissioners involved in the study are generally supportive of the plan.
In April of last year, 27 property owners, holding a combined 1100 acres around Hoytsville, submitted a Village Overlay application. The following month, the County Council approved an Overlay Study Area and appointed seven of the owners to a committee.
Among the activities since then, they held an Open House last fall; received 33 surveys back on a mapping exercise; and they have drafted a Future Land Use Map.
The Committee also includes three East Side Commissioners. They made some comments at the June 18th Planning Commission session.
Tom Clyde said it’s an interesting concept, and is certainly a big proposal.
“It’s a huge project and a ton of density. And the density—it’s a lot. But the goal on it is to build a density or have it happen in a way that is well thought out and well-planned. The template is kind of the Daybreak project out in South Jordan. It’s a good mix of housing types and some commercial mixed in with it.”
He said growth will come, and the question is how to plan it. Clyde said he’s rather not do it, looking incrementally at small subdivisions of five lots or so each.
“And it’s one subdivision, and another subdivision, and another subdivision. And we fight the connectivity and the livability all the way. Or you do an overall plan like this and anticipate needs as best we can working ahead 30 years on a build-out, and try to develop something that is a functional community from the get-go.”
Planning Commissioner Rich Sonntag said the Village area is an appropriate size for the kind of plan before them.
“Yeah, I mean, this is an appropriate size of real estate to plan something like a Master Plan community. Obviously, there are out-parcels, adjacent parcels, that over time probably want to be sucked into this process and be accorded the same zoning and infrastructure benefits that we will be envisioning for the Master Plan itself. Something like this, in order to be feasible, in order to build the freeway interchange, in order to build the sewer plant, in order to do all the major infrastructure that needs to be constructed—it needs to have a pretty basic heavy density.”
He talked about where the density will go, and an assessment district it could lead to.
“It needs to have an overall density of something like 5 to the acre, that would then get clustered even more than that in the Town Center areas and spread out along the edges into different housing types. But that’s what it takes to support, not only the infrastructure burden, but to create the tax base necessary for the other tool that I thinks gonna be necessary, which is a facilities, public infrastructure district, they call them in Utah, which would be an assessment-based, bond-issuing mechanism that creates the infrastructure for something like this with all of the property owners participating, and those who want to join the district then adding their own property in, and becoming subject to the assessment over time.”
Finally, East Side Commissioner Bill Wilde, a Hoytsville resident himself, said it’s a good plan, and they need housing.
But he said he has two major concerns. One is, they need more study of the roads.
Second, Wilde said they need to involve the public more.
“I’ve been involved in two processes in Hoytsville of incorporating. They both failed dramatically. But I think we need to have more public input. It’s going to affect a lot of people in Hoytsville. I think some’s afraid to hear from the public. And I think we need to make sure they’re involved. That’s a big concern I have, that I don’t feel that we’ve done that to this point.’
East Side Commissioner Bill Wilde.
The staff reported that for this summer, they will continue work on the Draft Village Plan, receive comments from Service Providers and work toward a hearing before the Planning Commission.
