Staff returned to Asheville City Council with proposed amendments to the stormwater ordinance. Council sent it back to staff in January because they had been presented with 200 pages of reports, with four days to do due diligence, and a few items were really making some people mad.
The public comment tonight was the best in seven years of city council meetings. People objected to council’s attempt to take more property rights away from landowners. It would prevent development in a 30′ strip on both sides of 562.5 miles of streams. The steep slope/ridge top ordinance prevents building on even more acreage.
Jerry Sternberg ripped a precut piece of paper to show what that meant to the owner of a one-acre lot with a stream going through the middle. Scott Dedman who works to build a lot of affordable housing, asked how making parcels unbuildable would contribute to the city’s goal of increasing affordable housing stock. Paul Szurek of Biltmore Farms calculated the planning penalty of the ordinance would be $40,000 per home.
Szurek also noted local water quality began improving in 2004. The stormwater ordinance was not implemented until 2007. Pete Hildebrand said if the city really wanted to improve water quality, it would regulate the runoff government projects are sending to rivers, which is the main source of water pollution. He listed some nonprofit projects that would not be allowed without variances to the proposed amendments.
The one-size-fits-all approach was touted as necessary because a matrix Hildebrand had proposed was considered to be too complex for public comprehension. Hildebrand pointed out that the ordinance called for state-licensed professionals to review anything that would involve the matrix, and then hefted a state building code book and then the city’s building code book, saying anybody who could understand all that could surely understand his little matrix. Lastly, Hildebrand called attention to the fact that parameters in the ordinance had been decided upon with bad information. For example, it turned out the state expected the ordinance to apply to three times as many streams as staff had initially supposed.
Council voted to one-up the state minimum mandate by requiring 30′ buffers on all streamfronts. The state only requires the buffers on parcels one acre or greater. Cecil Bothwell made a motion to increase buffer size to 40′ on riverfronts with a grade of 15-25% and 50′ on riverfronts with grades in excess of 25%. That measure didn’t pass.
