Dear FOMC
FOMC applauds John Bridger’s team from the RPA for recognizing and promoting the need for Chattanooga to preserve greenspaces and protect environmentally sensitives areas from careless development. The staff has generated a report addressed to City Council that recommends that new ordinance(s) be written to meet this need. This report has been released for public comment. I have attached a pdf version of the Executive summary (first 9 pages) in this email. I am also providing a link to the RPA website where the entire report and a list of dates for related meetings is located at
http://chcrpa.org/index.php/project/steep-slopes-and-floodplains/
Other than the recommendation to upgrade Chattanooga’s ordinances, the rest of the report’s language is more suggestion than recommendation for what the City Council should require the ordinance to address. The report compared Chattanooga’s existing ordinances to several other nearby cites including Knoxville, Nashville and Ashville. That comparison revealed that Chattanooga’s current ordinances address only 2 of 22 areas of concerns raised by residents over recent developments and concludes that Chattanooga is out of step with the rest of the region. Chattanooga’s zoning ordinance has not been updated in twenty years.
The report lists categories of areas addressed in other cities and options for how each could potentially be addressed here. Some of these suggestions offer consolations to developers to allow increased density in return for preserving areas of property that have environmentally sensitive areas (steep slopes, trees, etc.) and others seem to be things that should have been required all along.
Please take some time to review the report. FOMC would appreciate your help in getting the word out to support of the recommendations identified in the report and to attend the public hearing on November 5th. Or, you can email City Council or RPA staff members with specific concerns you have about topics addressed in the report.
I would like to hear and share your concerns about this report’s content within this group. Email at FOMCQuarry@gmail.com I have some of my own.
Next Dates:
Nov 5th @ 6:00 p.m. Public Hearing City Council Chambers.
Thanks for supporting the Friends of Mountain Creek