Business owners, council, discuss downtown plan tonight

WASILLA — Residents will have one more chance to weigh in on the proposed downtown overlay district tonight at 6 p.m.

The downtown overlay district would restrict certain types of businesses and provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for businesses within a set portion of the Wasilla downtown. Planning officials said the rules are not intended as absolutes, and that the planning commission could waive them at the individual developer’s request.

The district would also allow owners of present businesses prohibited under the district’s rules to be sold intact to subsequent buyers, officials said.

The district has sparked a rare joint meeting of the city council and planning commission, held May 26, after business owners questioned the district’s goals. The item is also on the city council's agenda for this evening.

The goal of the joint meeting was to clear the air to an extent, said Wasilla Mayor Bert Cottle.

“We’re trying to make this as user-friendly as we can,” he said. “Nobody’s trying to shove this down anybody’s throat.”

City planner Tina Crawford told council members and planning commissioners the restrictions would increase property values, create an inviting, pedestrian-friendly downtown and encouraging development.

“For developers and business, it gives them clear, easy-to-understand regulations,” she said. “In my experience in 15 years of planning, developers have always had concerns about what regulations are, but their biggest, No. 1 complaint is: ‘I want it clear, I want to know what the expectations are, and I wanna know that if I (mark) all the check boxes, I’m going to get my approval at the end of the day. Don’t be changing your mind and changing the rules and making all the criteria subjective. Make it clear and make it objective.’”

She cited a newly designed service center by Kendall Ford as an example of how the process works. The dealership had first sought an unadorned, boxy building with a 180-foot unbroken roofline, and was told that it didn’t fit with design standards for the area. The dealership and owners ended up negotiating the design of the new building for six months before ultimately adding some design flourishes. Negotiations could have ended much sooner if staff had possessed criteria to make their point, Crawford said.

The downtown overlay district has been in the works since 2006, Crawford said.

Planning commissioners said they had not seen many of those taking issue with the design, or any who said they were unaware of the district — including former planning commissioner Bill Green — at commission meetings to object to particular aspects they now found objectionable. City officials also say the district should be approved ahead of the planned construction of a traffic couplet through downtown.

Business owners said they had not been informed about the process to object, despite being generally informed in the community.

Other business owners said the cost of construction would place an unfair burden on property owners, required under the proposed rules to provide some improvements out of their own pocket.

Green described a long-term plan for his business by which he would accumulate enough parcels and combine them together to make them appealing for large-scale development. The design standards would interfere with it, he said.

Green’s tenure on the commission drew questioning from councilwoman Colleen Sullivan-Leonard. Green said he’d worked on some parts of the plan, but hadn’t understood the scale of the project, or its ultimate goal, until the end.

“It’s kind of like a cancer,” he said. “It grows along, and you don’t know you have it until these stages start coming forward.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.