Planning Commission to Consider Commercial Zoning Updates on September
Published on September 06, 2023
The Planning Commission will consider proposed changes to the City of Kalamazoo’s Zoning Ordinance and Map at its meeting on Thursday, September 7 at 7 p.m. The meeting will be held in the City Commission Chambers at City Hall, 241 W South Street. It will be broadcast live on the City’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.
The Planning Commission is expected to vote on whether or not to recommend the proposed updates to the City Commission for approval. If recommended, the proposal would be presented to the City Commission for a final vote later this fall.
The proposed updates are related to commercial zoning districts and their related standards, like signs, landscaping, screening, and lighting. When the updates were first introduced in the spring, City staff started a public engagement process to review the proposal with community members and hear feedback, questions, and concerns. A series of public meetings were held, staff met one-on-one with affected property owners, and staff discussed questions and concerns received directly via phone and email. Presentations were also made to the Planning Commission, Natural Features Protection Review Board, and the City Commission.
The proposal was revised four times in this process, and what is being considered includes several changes based on community feedback. A summary of changes by section is included in the Agenda Memo with the meeting agenda. The final proposed updates and map are also available as part of the agenda. More background on this project and the engagement process is available online at imaginekalamazoo.com.
Theseproposedupdates to the Zoning Code and Mapare part of a larger effort to overhaul the Zoning Code that started in 2018.The Code has been updated incrementally in focused sections, previously focusing on the biggest barriers in the Code (like removing nonconformances related to lot size and area from most residential districts), following Neighborhood Plans, specific goals in the Imagine Kalamazoo Master Plan related to zoning, and other updates like those related to cannabis.As updates are approved by the City Commission, the regulations are moved out of the 2005 Zoning Code in Appendix A to the Chapter 50 Zoning Ordinance.