New plan may allow planners more for less

Ken Threet, a member of the Bedford County Board of Zoning Appeals, left, and Dean Delk, right, a Marshall County commissioner, listen to a planing consultant from Rhode Island speak to nearly 100 area officials about conservation planning. (T-G Photo by Clint Confehr) [Click to enlarge]

Conservation planning, an approach to housing development that might result in more for less with imagination, was described to nearly 100 leaders from Bedford, Marshall and other nearby counties on Thursday night during a seminar here in Shelbyville.

Swapping large home sites for a neighborhood playground and a village instead of a sprawling subdivision was a chief point by the featured speaker, Randall Arendt, an independent landscape planer, site designer, author, lecturer and advocate of conservation planning.

With photos, drawings and commentary, Arendt explained how, for example, roads with some homes located only on one side of a street will provide a better image for a more economical development than one that's viewed by passing motorists who see backyards, or privacy fences.

Kip L. Green, director of planning and codes for Shelbyville, said the general public should know about ideas like greater density, more homes closer together, and how that's a classic win-win proposition for residents, their municipality and those who develop subdivisions.

"When the density numbers create the same number of lots with less roads and utilities, both the developers and the governments, which receive that infrastructure, win," Green said.

Homes clustered in a hamlet allow shorter roads, meaning less pavement maintenance. Shorter distances between homes also means shorter pipes and wires for utilities. Construction costs less, but once the infrastructure is deeded over to a municipality, fewer repairs might be required.

Arendt's discussion might be seen as the next level of a discussion that started late last fall among Bedford County leaders who agreed to consider changing a state-required 20-year plan for growth. That discussion among selected community leaders is being expanded on Tuesday, March 27, at 5:30 p.m. in the community room of the Duck River Electric Membership Corp.

While the 20-year plans are to show where municipalities may and may not annex land during two decades, the plans force local leaders to peer into the future and try to avoid mistakes made in the past.

State law mandates compact and logical urban growth areas around municipalities so there's a logical extension of utilities and other infrastructure, instead of housing developments located where they strain city services.

Conservation planning, however, is more than a way for developers and city managers to save money by reducing the amount of asphalt and piping while making more efficient use of land.

Protecting environmentally sensitive lands is another essential point made by Arendt on conservation planning.

Examples may include using an historic or environmentally sensitive feature as a center piece in open space around which homes are built, according to Arendt's presentation.

Preservation of a grove of trees might be the goal of a development designed through conservation planning so that the woods become a feature of interest for residents of a new neighborhood.

Conservation planning calls for an understanding of the lay of the land and that can lead to less excavation and better drainage, he said.

One of the photos displayed by Arendt shows a fence row of hackberry trees around a small creek which became the location for a median strip for a divided road in a new development. Residents' front windows afford a view across one lane of one-way traffic and beyond that there are trees and a park-like place separating homes.

"How do you get open space out of a subdivision of 7,500-square-foot lots? It's pretty easy," Arendt said. "Shrink the lots to 5,000 square feet and then you have one third open space.

"The key thing is not to zone by lot size," he said. "Zone by density."

Most of the people in his audience were county and municipal planning commissioners and members of boards of zoning appeals from Bedford, Rutherford, Marshall, Maury, Giles and other nearby counties.

"It's something that the planning commission has talked about wanting to implement to conserve and preserve farm land," Bedford County Planning Commissioner Linda Yockey said. "It's the way to go.

"We've had a developer come in and present [subdivision maps] that use these principles," she said, referring to Marvin Parker of the Parker Brothers development company.

He proposed 45 homes on 50 acres, but would have had small lots that would allow 65-75 percent open space, Yockey said.

"But we couldn't approve it because it didn't fit our zoning," she said.

Arendt's recommendations do call for new subdivision regulations and changes to zoning ordinances. Models for such requirements are available from the Local Planning Office of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Kennon Threet, president of the Bedford County Utility District, a member of the Bedford County Board of Zoning Appeals and a long-time farmer here, said he believes conservation planning "should be an improvement to what we are doing now."

"We're always open to suggestions and improvement," Threet said.

Shelbyville City Manager Ed Craig has said reopening the 20-year growth plans for Bedford County and all its municipalities is one of a two pronged project so the governments can deal with growth better and also address issues associated with growth; those being environmental, cultural and aesthetic.

While the public hearing set for Tuesday night next week in the electric co-op's building on Madison Street can include all those issues, the approach to amending the 20-year growth plan in neighboring Marshall County has focused almost exclusively on amending the 20-year growth plan.

At the same time, subdivision regulations are being re-examined at Chapel Hill where town leaders have said they want to get rid of the requirement to have a landscape architect because some see it as adding an unnecessary cost when landscape standards might be enforced by a town employee.

Arendt's presentation opened with the distribution of miniature M&M candy packages and ended with the suggestion that they be placed on broad sheets of paper to indicate where homes might be built in clusters instead of rows on a series of streets.

The Nature Conservancy and the Duck River Agency paid for the catered dinner during the four-hour seminar. Arendt's $5,500 lecture fee was paid for at about $55 per person attending.