Errors, Omissions & Discrepancies

Care4Suffolk — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0000

Citizens require transparency and thoroughness from their government. The Public can not be informed and involved if the government does not provide all necessary information. It is a minimum. When the government fails to fully disclose information, makes the process cumbersome or convoluted, or ignores important details in the name of time or labor saving, then the Public suffers.

Unfortunately, with REZONING REQUEST, RZN2021-00018, (Conditional), Lake Kilby Shores, this is what has happened. There have been a slew of errors, omissions, and discrepancies. City Council should vote NO to this rezoning request for this reasons alone. Below they are itemized:

Prior to First Planning Commission Meeting:

➢ No street address was listed in Public Notices.

The notice listed only parcel IDs, which makes it very difficult for the Public to know where this property is located and therefore assess its impact.

➢ Planning Department approved developer’s traffic study despite it being out of date, containing errors, and missing important data on the two nearest intersections.

The Planning Department recommended approval of the Kilby rezoning based on bad data at the second Planning Commission meeting.
Today, the Planning Department knows the data is bad. They should retract their approval and require the developer to resubmit a thorough, complete study.
There are conflicting statements from the developer regarding the widening of Kilby: We will widen the road to a minimum 20 ft vs. We will widen the road up to 20 ft within the available right of way.
Additionally, the study was done during the pandemic when traffic was greatly reduced. No effort was made to provide up-to-date traffic data in the Traffic Study.
A proper traffic study would have (and should have) identified these limitations.

➢ The developer’s “narrative” provided to the Planning Department, included in the Staff Report packet, makes unsupported claims that were never questioned by anyone:

It states that, “In a review of the City’s available homes for sale, as well as discussing with realtors, there is still a deficit in supply of detached single family homes.” There is no supporting evidence or statistics to back up this claim.

➢ The narrative also states that, “Due to the rather low comparative density, the applicant is not submitting a proffer limiting the number of units in the project. The final number of units will be determined in the engineering phase.”

This is confusing because there is a listed proffer of 204 homes. We pointed out this contradiction to Planning, but they did not encourage the developer to fix this sloppy error.

At the March 21, 2023 Planning Commission Meeting:

➢ Order of agenda items was changed with short notice.

Caused the Public Hearing to be significantly later, impacting more than 100 citizens that attended.

➢ Developer removed a small wedge parcel from the proposed plan in order to prevent connectivity and Planning Department recommended rezoning despite connectivity being an established practice in city planning. Connectivity is safer and more cost effective for citizens.

On October 18, 2023, the Planning Department recommended denial of the rezoning application on the basis of non-connectivity.
The developer removing this small portion of land was done to intentionally skirt the best practices in city planning that requires adjacent developments to connect roads.

➢ The Planning Department presented slides with the developer’s road section analysis, which had not been made available to the public.

➢ The proffers state the the houses will be a minimum of 1850 sq ft, however, the Fiscal Impact Study uses 2720 sq ft for calculations.

This creates a big difference in cost of building materials and tax revenue.

At April 19, 2023 City Council Meeting:

➢ On April 18th, the day before City Council, the developer requested a 120–day deferral with the only reason being “for the Council to have sufficient time to evaluate the application prior to voting on it.”

City Council did not have to approve this deferral, but they did; a public hearing was still held and they also voted to schedule a second public hearing for August 16th.
The developer has played games with a lot of peoples’ time and our City Council let him get away with unnecessarily dragging out this rezoning issue.

➢ The Planning Department used the wrong conceptual site map during his Staff Report presentation (he presented the original one from October 2022, not the one with the 18 acre parcel removed).

This could have incorrectly led Council Members and citizens to believe that the proposed development will connect with the development to the north of the property.

➢ Packet was missing photos and several other documents, as well as public comments, that were submitted via the portal.

Planning was notified, but did nothing to rectify the situation.

➢ Intentional omission of key parts of the UDO description/purpose statement for Residential Medium zoning:

The developer narrative omitted the entire first sentence about RM zoning’s purpose being where “adequate public facilities and services ARE available”.
Planning’s Staff Report omitted the entire paragraph from the UDO and instead only quoted the two words “ideally suited.”

➢ Developer proffered any and all possible building materials and foundation types.

When every option is proffered, how is the city supposed to plan for or ensure quality of development?

➢Proffers have never been updated to reflect the very large increase in costs for new schools in the City’s current Capital Improvements Program.

There is also no requirement in the Staff Report to list when any new schools are forecasted to be built—how effective are proffers if a school won’t be replaced for almost a decade and costs are going up by the tens of millions?
Example: Elephant’s Fork Elementary is already at 120% capacity, but not due for replacement until at least 2029 (estimated completion in 2031).

Prior to August 16, 2023 City Council Meeting:

➢ Many public comments and submissions were not included in the City Council packet, again.

Many citizens are unable to make these public hearings, so they submit their comments via the portal only to have some go missing.

Many of these errors, omissions, and discrepancies were brought to the attention of the Planning Department prior to them making their recommendation for approval, but still remain incorrect or absent. The errors, omissions, and discrepancies all seem to favor the developer. None of this is in the best interest of the citizens of Suffolk.

Care4Suffolk supports growth and development, but it MUST be done responsibility. All of these errors, omissions, and discrepancies should have been corrected. There have been months to fix these, but the Planning Department is content to accept an incomplete traffic study. They gave their recommendation to approve even though the road improvements will not even meet the state’s minimum standards and knowing full well that the developer is avoiding connecting his proposed development with the adjacent development. Connectivity provides added safety to communities. The Planning Department knows this and is still allowing this. Delay tactics by the developer, including last-minute and lengthy deferrals, along with changes in the agenda order, as well as public comments going missing, have negatively impacted the Public’s ability to be engaged in the process.

The Public requires the Planning Department to fulfill its responsibility and change its recommendation of approval to denial and City Council needs to act in the best interest of the citizens and vote NO to this rezoning on Lake Kilby Road.

traffic study – Care4Suffolk

Errors, Omissions & Discrepancies