Heber City Planning Commission has looked long and hard at the proposed Form Based Code that would change zoning ordinances affecting most properties within the city. Heber City Council sent out a letter to the community outlining the change and inviting them to a public hearing on Oct 12.
Tony Kohler is the planning director.
“The Form Based Code, as it is drafted right now, has development guidelines that require a particular architectural style," Kohler said. "More of the traditional architecture of the turn of the century that would be more of a burden in addition to that design criteria would apply to multi-family housing but not single-family.”
One of the main premises of Form Based Code is to include pedestrians into the planning by putting them on equal footing with vehicles.
“There’s more thought put to the development patterns on private property for pedestrians," Kohler said. "Such as bringing buildings toward the streets and putting parking lots in the back as well as planning the street so that they are inclusive of pedestrians and bicyclists with wider sidewalks, wider planter strips and street trees.”
Part of the design requirements of the Form Base Code could potentially impact affordability – raising the costs of homes.
“Their concern has been potential impacts on single-family dwellings because this is a city-wide effort," Kohler said. "And they wanted to make sure that any impacts on single-family would not be too onerous and so there’s been a lot of discussion about how to deal with additions to single-family dwellings. That’s been the biggest issue. Second issue has been transportation and how do we transfer or change our paradigm from our current transportation plans to a form-based plan and that’s been challenging as we need to sit down with our engineers to figure out how that would work.”
At the public hearing, the planning commission consultants will first give a brief description of the proposed changes so the community better understands what the commission has been working on over the past several months. The public will then be invited to give their feedback.
"This go-around, the council has asked that we put out a pros and cons document and an invitation to everybody which we’ll be mailing out this week," Kohler said. "We want everyone to review those and do some critical thinking and provide the best feedback they can so the council can make a determination on whether to approve this or not.”
The council won’t be making a motion on Oct. 12. They’re sole purpose is to take note and listen to the public. The consideration of approval or rejection of the proposed changes won’t take place until a later meeting that has yet to be determined but, Kohler said it may be late Oct. or early Nov.
The public hearing on Oct. 12 will be at 6 p.m. in the Wasatch County Senior Citizen Center on 1200 South.