Zoning Commission briefs City Council on draft zoning code

ZCC Special Briefing 

ZCC consultant Don Elliott of Clarion Associates provided City Council with an overview of the draft code’s new structure, highlighting important changes and focusing attention on potential flash point issues. Mr. Elliott emphasized that now is the time for input. “We really need your comments at this point. We want to know if we got the details right,” he said. While most councilmembers sent staff to learn more about the 438-page document, ZCC member and City Councilman Brian O’Neill was there to ensure proposed changes to the code are clearly understood. “When this comes over to Council, we don’t want to vote on something we don’t understand,” O’Neill said. “We are going to be held accountable.”

Councilman O’Neill would like to see a detailed analysis that would indicate what the differences are between the current and proposed codes and what the impacts of those changes are. He also cautioned the ZCC about zoning in a city with localized issues. “Using a broad brush approach doesn’t always work in Philadelphia,” O’Neill said. For example, the draft code would allow the creation of accessory dwelling units in existing residential neighborhoods, a situation that O’Neill describes as a source of complaint in his district. “I don’t want this issue to kill an otherwise good effort,” he said. In other districts, council staff indicated that the sticking point may be the location of methadone clinics.

Additional questions were related to proposed administrative decision-making and the consolidation of zoning districts. Council technical staff wanted to know how L&I will make judgments on cases that were once sent to the ZBA. Mr. Elliott explained that objective criteria were created for each decision that has to be made and that there are limits to the relief that can be granted. Others wanted to know the difference between consolidating districts for the new zoning code and the remapping of districts that will occur later. Elliott acknowledged that in order to simplify the code and reduce the number of base zoning districts and overlays, some “blurring of distinctions” had to happen. “New zoning districts incorporate some of the old, even if they were not identical,” he said. “The ZCC decided which distinctions the city could not live without and which could be discarded in that process, but the actual zoning lines did not change.”

ZCC chair Alan Greenberger described the amount of public outreach related to this effort as “impressive,” but acknowledged that new zoning regulations will still come as a surprise to many residents. “There will be lots of people who say they didn’t know this was coming,” Greenberger said. But he reiterated that when the final draft is presented to City Council this November, councilmembers will still have an opportunity to develop a list of issues to send back to the ZCC for consideration.