After a two-year process, the city has adopted a comprehensive new Land Development Code despite one city councilman’s hesitation.
At the regular meeting Nov. 9, the Taylor City Council voted 4-1 to adopt the Taylor Made LDC, which will completely overhaul all zoning, subdivision and sign regulations, and to adopt a new zoning map reflecting the new zoning within city limits.
“This puts our comprehensive plan into action,” said District 2 Councilman Mitch Drummond of the LDC, which was authored by urban design consultants Simplecity.Design. “I think it protects our neighborhoods, our current neighborhoods and it ensures that the future neighborhoods look the way we want them to look. Developers are coming here to make their fortunes in our community, and we want the new developments to look like Taylor, and I think this accomplishes that.”
Citizen Sandra Wolff said she was in favor of the plan, but objected to a section that uses the City of Austin as a model for construction standards and wants to implement green technology to protect the environment as well.
“You guys got a lot done, awesome job,” Wolff said. “Of course, not everyone was happy, but Taylor was going to grow.”
But At-large Councilman Dwayne Ariola said it was too soon to act, due to the fact that the new engineering code, which was later approved unanimously in the meeting, had not yet been approved, and since members of the City Council of Bastrop, which also implemented a SimpleCity-authored LDC several years ago, had reached out to the city to express their misgivings about problems with their new regulations.
“I’m onboard with the process we did, but we now have five city councilmen in Bastrop that are against and trying to change the SimpleCity (Design) process that they did three years ago, with the same scenario, the rodeos, the DNA meetings,” Ariola said. “But they are ahead of us three years and did an actual implementation. So, I guess my concern is, let’s just tap on the brakes because I received an email today from councilmembers in Bastrop that they are more than willing to come talk to us.”
But District 4 Councilman Robert Garcia said he actually had the opportunity to meet with a Bastrop councilman and address some of his concerns regarding their city staff’s interpretation of the new zoning laws.
“I actually did meet with another councilmember from Bastrop … and we conversated for over an hour and he brought up to me the pains that they had I actually met with (Assistant City Manager) Tom (Yantis) on,” he said. “And Tom has already addressed those.”
“I think we are golden,” he added.
District 1 City Councilman Gerald Anderson also expressed his support for the plan and objected to members of the Bastrop council seeking to influence Taylor’s governance.
“I just don’t understand Bastrop interfering with the city of Taylor,” Anderson said. “I’m not going to go to a Bastrop City Council meeting and tell them how to run their town ... I look forward to adopting this ordinance.”
In other business, council unanimously approved increasing the number of police officers in the department from 18 to 21 officers.
