Business community should monitor Planning and Zoning Commission

Business community should monitor Planning and Zoning Commission
The application window for three vacant seats on the Columbia Planning and Zoning Commission closed several weeks ago but not before more than 20 residents had applied to sit on the panel. There’s no pay, and the sessions can be long and tedious. Some say this spate of applications represents heightened interest in the often-contentious realm of the city’s growth and development and what we want Columbia to look like in the future.
Entrepreneurs and businesspeople should be paying attention to what goes on at the Columbia Planning and Zoning Commission as much as they keep track of what the Columbia City Council is doing.

I believe it is time to amend the city charter to shift some of the deliberative burdens involving planning, growth and development issues from the City Council to a reconstituted Planning and Zoning Commission. As the city has grown, the present bifurcated system of advice by one body, with approval or denial by the other, has shown a tendency to be unworkably burdensome. The Planning and Zoning Commission should be given the authority to make binding decisions the City Council then assents to, just as the Board of Adjustment has been authorized to grant variances on its own authority.

Presently there are two deliberative stages after a zoning or land use application is filed with the Planning Department. Once the city staff has reviewed each application, the appointed Planning and Zoning Commission hears public testimony before making its recommendation to the Columbia City Council. The council is under no obligation to follow P&Z’s advice and frequently does not.

A few weeks later, the council duplicates much of what the Planning and Zoning Commission has already gone over. This is a typically repetitious process that includes hearing more public comment with the council, often spurring one or more postponements before the final vote is taken. Timekeepers have recorded council adjournments well past midnight when clarity of thought and reasoning would be deficient.

Radical changes, such how zoning issues are processed and determined, should be part of a thorough review of the Columbia City Charter—a document first promulgated in 1949—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I believe steps should be taken to amend the charter. Columbia should replace the existing nomination-by-council procedure in constituting Planning and Zoning Commission membership with individual ward-by-ward representation through popular vote (one member per ward) with the Commission’s seventh member elected at-large following the pattern of how the mayor of Columbia is chosen.

Terms would be staggered, just as is the case with the council, while the existing non-partisan nature of representation is maintained. The fortified Planning and Zoning Commission would have the authority to issue absolute decisions in each case before handing them over for routine approval as part of the City Council’s consent agenda, thus relieving the latter body of a considerable administrative burden.

Back to the home rule charter, the City Council should appoint a panel of citizens to examine the document and recommend possible changes and amendments if modernizing the document is necessary. Maybe matters are fine as they stand, but I’ll bet some fine tuning would be in order.

Those of you still smarting over the outcome of the mildly contentious battle for two vacant seats on the Columbia City Council several weeks ago—piqued because your candidate didn’t win—should start paying attention to the winner’s playbook. The two successful candidates won because they wanted to. Each winner worked his ward over and over and over again ad nauseam. This meant relentless, face-to-face contact right up to the last minute one could vote, often to the point of making sure their supporters physically made it to the polls. The winners deserved to win because their hearts and minds were immersed in their quest.

Next election, maybe an entrepreneur will decide to work just as hard to gain a seat on the City Council as he or she worked to initiate and execute a successful business plan.