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The proposed Unified Zoning Ordinance would clear up much of the confusion regarding lodging, restaurant and bar uses and relax parking requirements many downtown businesses face, the ordinance’s writers told the Savannah Area Tourism Leadership Council on Thursday during the group’s monthly luncheon.
The proposed new ordinance, known as UZO for short, is meant to replace the half-century-old zoning guidelines used by the City of Savannah and unincorporated Chatham County. The initial draft was released in June 2011 and has undergone significant revisions since.
Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission staffers outlined several changes that would take result from the proposed ordinance’s adoption.
They also urged the audience, which included hotel, tour, restaurant and retail store operators, to ask questions and voice concerns related to the document.
“We need to understand what issues are out there,” said the MPC’s Charlotte Moore, who has led the UZO project. “This is a complex undertaking and there are some issues that get overlooked until somebody points them out to us.”
Moore and her assistant, Amanda Bunce, have been “incredibly open and responsive” to concerns voiced by the public, said TLC President and CEO Michael Owens. The UZO’s initial draft met with significant pushback and led to a slowing of the review process to “scrub” and “polish” the draft, in the words of MPC Executive Director Tom Thomson.
The MPC adopted a sector-by-sector approach in the fall and held nine public information sessions on the UZO over the winter.
The presentation at the TLC luncheon was the MPC’s latest public outreach effort. With several projects underway or in the planning stages, TLC members packed the basement dining room of the Lady & Sons restaurant to hear Moore, Bunce and Thomson speak.
Much of the post-presentation discussion involved parking and property uses within specific zones. The availability of parking on the street, in surface lots and in parking garages in the historic district led to the MPC altering the parking requirements in the ordinance. In some cases, that means fewer spaces. In others, businesses will find more flexibility in securing remote or shared parking.
As for the use changes, the goal is to “maintain character,” Bunce said.
“The way in which neighborhoods have developed over time needs to be maintained,” Bunce said. “We need to avoid allowing uses that will adversely affect character.”
The MPC’s leader, Thomson, summed up the UZO’s potential impact by calling it the “one thing legislatively that will benefit every single resident in Chatham County.”
ON THE WEB
Go to unifiedzoning.org to learn more about UZO. The website includes a matrix of questions and answers and the UZOOM tool, which allows users to compare information on the existing and proposed zoning rules for any property in Savannah or unincorporated Chatham County.
