Planning Commissions - Challenges

The interesting thing about city planning commissions is how much time and effort they need to spend on individual residential inquiries -- understanding the impact on a neighbor's view, determining if the specified trees are compliant with the city's expectations, providing guidance on fence setbacks. Over the course of 2 hours, 90 minutes or more could be spent on these items. How then does a planning commission get to focus on the larger scale issues that impact the quality of life for hundreds if not thousands of residents, business owners, and visitors? Some municipalities are using "visual" planning codes which do away with most of the text of existing codes and literally have pictures and illustrations to communicate what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to the municipality. Compliance by an architect/builder to the guidelines generally means auto-approval, speeding the development process. A proposal not adhering to the specification must go through a "significant" review justifying why the plan needs to be out of specification. Given that the visual plan represents the desires of the municipality and the community as a whole, approval to violate the code is an unlikely event.

The good news is that this model addresses the needs of the community by clearly communicating to architects/builders what they're looking for. Equally architects/builders benefit by more rapid design approval. The biggest challenge is moving from "traditional" planning ordinances to a visual model. City council, planning commissions, and the residents as a whole need sufficient vision to understand the benefits.