The Snyderville Planning Commission’s regular session on Tuesday is the first in a series of work meetings to hammer out a number of issues in the Snyderville General Plan and its Development Code.
County Development Director Pat Putt says the work program, running out to next summer, will be very ambitious. In fact, he calls it “a moon shot.”
Putt met with the Summit County Council just last week to review the work program. He told KPCW the plan is to set out a block of time at every Snyderville Planning session, from 4:30 p.m. to 6, to discuss General Plan and Code issues. After that they will turn to the regular agenda.
The Snyderville Commisisoners are meeting Tuesday, January 12th, in a Zoom meeting starting at 4:30. Putt said that first off, they will be talking about the Commercial Zones in the Basin—Neighborhood Commercial, Community Commercial and Service Commercial.
He said they will talk about what uses they might want to expand, or which ones they might drop. They will also look at some design items.
“We want to make sure some of the design standards, the performance standards, exceptions for rooftop mechanical equipment and screening and those sorts of more detailed design considerations are consistent with some of the issues that we’ve been dealing with in the past. I know in terms of building heights and exceptions for screening, we’ve been working on that with the Commission previously. But this is gonna be a chance to go back and take a look at it from a more holistic point of view.”
He said they will follow a similar program for the East Side Planning Commission, where they could discuss items like historic preservation, housing and economic development.
Putt said that they have a well-defined meeting schedule, two excellent Planning Commissions, and good guidance from the County Council.
“It may have been Doug Clyde who used the “80-20 rule”: Often times, you spend 80 percent of your time on the last 20 percent. What the Council has reassured the Commission, and I think they’ll say the same thing to the East Side Planning Commission, is ‘Hey, give us your absolute best work. Give us that 80 percent. We’re gonna go through it ourselves. There’s gonna be some additional public comment and editing and vetting. But give us that 80 percent and we’ll take care of that final 20.”
He said some of the issues will likely bring out public comment. One of those is accessory buildings.
“There are probably reasonable uses that will go into sort of these accessory buildings that we need to find a way to accommodate. I think what we’re gonna try and do is find that balance between the neighborhood character and predictability, not end up with an open-ended Development Code that allows for proliferation of really large buildings that are out of scale with the neighborhoods that they’re potentially going to be built in.”
County Development Director Pat Putt, who said they hope that a package of recommendations on the Snyderville General Plan will go on to the Council in early June, and similarly, recommendations on the Code will be forwarded in August.
