The City of Greenfield is updating its Unified Development Ordinance to fix issues that the city has found since developing it in 2020.
This update is largely to make clarifications and fill gaps in the existing code, which the city developed in 2020 while making adjustments to rules surrounding downtown buildings.
“We realized as we try to apply it, you have to be very specific in the wording, and maybe we didn’t get it right the first time around, so we just tweaked those words so that they said exactly what we needed them to say,” Greenfield Planning Director Joanie Fitzwater said.
She said that the changes to downtown zoning rules aligned better with the way that downtown was actually developing in reality. “We realized that our previous zone code made houses in the downtown district legal non-conforming,” Fitzwater said. “That means they can exist, but you can’t expand them, you can’t repair them beyond a certain point because the idea was to gain attrition of the houses to make room for downtown buildings.”
This new code fully legalizes the existing houses and requires that new businesses wanting to utilize the land of those downtown houses must maintain the aesthetics of the surrounding residential area. The number of parking spaces required for downtown businesses was also decreased to account for the public parking downtown, requiring the businesses to provide less parking of their own.
Fitzwater said that this will be the UDO’s final update before Greenfield’s new comprehensive plan is completed and the UDO changed to match the new plan.
“Every 10 to 15 years you update your comprehensive plan, and that is a process where you go out and you talk to the community and you do a lot of planning exercises with them to understand what they want,” she said. “What are their goals for your city? Then you use your zoning code to attain those goals.”
After last month’s second round of public meetings, the comprehensive plan is beginning to enter its finalization. The plan is currently being written by Rundell Erntsberger Associates, the city’s consultant for the project, and Fitzwater says that once that is finished, the city will host an open house for the public to see the new plan and make any final comments before it goes before the city council for approval. While the original hope was for the plan to be approved this year, Fitzwater said that it will likely be finished in early 2025.
Fitzwater said that she hopes the city will retain Rundell Erntsberger Associates after the final adoption of the plan to help keep the UDO in line with the new comprehensive plan when the ordinance is next updated following the passage of the plan.
