Sunbury Master Plan committee held first session last Thursday

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Dur­ing a plan­ning ses­sion imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing the Mon­day, March 19, Vil­lage of Sun­bury Plan­ning & Zon­ing Com­mis­sion meet­ing com­mis­sion mem­bers dis­cussed and rec­om­mended enter­ing into an agree­ment with the Delaware County Regional Plan­ning Com­mis­sion to res­ur­rect a 2003-04 Vil­lage of Sun­bury Com­pre­hen­sive Mas­ter Plan that was never for­mally adopted.

Sun­bury also paid the Delaware County Regional Plan­ning Com­mis­sion (DCRPC) to help develop that 2003-04 plan­ning doc­u­ment. Over the course of a year, then DCRPC Direc­tor Phil Lau­rien met with a steer­ing com­mit­tee dur­ing open pub­lic meet­ings and cre­ated a generic mas­ter plan that con­tained an abun­dance of regional back­ground infor­ma­tion — demo­graph­ics, growth esti­mates and land-use history.

The 2003-04 doc­u­ment made var­i­ous rec­om­men­da­tions based upon assump­tions that have now changed. Since 2003 the Nestlé prop­erty has changed, the Kroger site has changed, there have been down­town streetscape improve­ments, addi­tional side­walks through­out the vil­lage, the Granville Street Bridge was built, there was a major san­i­tary sewer plant upgrade, and the vil­lage is no longer in the water business.

Dur­ing 2008 Sun­bury Vil­lage Coun­cil mem­bers con­sid­ered a res­o­lu­tion to con­tract with Bird-Houk Col­lab­o­ra­tive to pre­pare a Vil­lage of Sun­bury Com­pre­hen­sive Mas­ter Plan. That res­o­lu­tion was tabled and finally defeated fol­low­ing the Octo­ber 2008 col­lapse of the sub-prime hous­ing mar­ket that drove the econ­omy into reces­sion. Vil­lage coun­cil mem­bers decided they could not afford to pay $100,000 for a mas­ter plan that required an addi­tional $25,000 traf­fic study.

DCRPC Direc­tor Scott Sanders attended a work ses­sion one hour before the reg­u­larly sched­uled Feb­ru­ary Vil­lage of Sun­bury Plan­ning & Zon­ing Com­mis­sion to dis­cuss options for updat­ing the 2003-04 doc­u­ment. At that ses­sion Sanders said since Sunbury’s 2003-04 doc­u­ment included a Vision­ing phase the old doc­u­ment could eas­ily be updated by hold­ing steer­ing com­mit­tee meet­ings open to the public.

Sun­bury Vil­lage Coun­cil mem­bers sub­se­quently approved funds to have DCRPC update the draft mas­ter plan, and at the Sep­tem­ber 19 coun­cil meet­ing steer­ing com­mit­tee dates were agreed on – the first Thurs­day of each month for at least the next six months – and the com­po­si­tion of the steer­ing com­mit­tee was announced.

The steer­ing com­mit­tee includes two mem­bers of vil­lage coun­cil, two mem­bers of the plan­ning and zon­ing com­mis­sion, a mem­ber from the Big Wal­nut Area His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, a mem­ber from the Big Wal­nut Local School Dis­trict, and two at-large mem­bers from the res­i­den­tial community.

The first steer­ing com­mit­tee meet­ing was held last Thurs­day, Novem­ber 1, in third floor coun­cil cham­bers, Sun­bury Town Hall.

In open­ing the ses­sion, Sanders gave what he called a brief exec­u­tive sum­mary of Sunbury.

The vil­lage encloses 1,932 acres. Of that acreage, 537 acres are res­i­den­tial, 118 acres are indus­trial, 143 acres are com­mer­cial, 209 acres are insti­tu­tional, 254 acres are agri­cul­tural and 535 acres are vacant.

In 2001 and 2002 there were 75 and 72 build­ing per­mits issued, respec­tively. Build­ing per­mits dropped to zero in 2005, climbed to 37 by 2009, and only 19 build­ing per­mits were issued dur­ing 2011. Over that 2001 to 2011 decade Sun­bury grew from a pop­u­la­tion of 2,813 to 4,591.

Between res­i­den­tial, farm, indus­trial and com­mer­cial prop­er­ties the vil­lage has $107,019,250 worth of real estate.

The vil­lage racial makeup is 4,179 Cau­casian, 50 African-American, 75 Latino, 7 Amer­i­can Indian, 52 Asian and 35 listed as Other.

Sanders also briefly described Delaware County Regional Plan­ning Commission’s areas of author­ity – county unin­cor­po­rated areas zon­ing respon­si­bil­ity, water­shed work and con­tract com­pre­hen­sive plans.

“We don’t have the author­ity a lot of peo­ple think we have,” Sanders said. “But we like to be at the table.”

Sanders also estab­lished the steer­ing com­mit­tee process — con­cen­trate the plan­ning area within vil­lage bound­aries, limit ses­sions to two hours each, go quickly through back­ground infor­ma­tion then get into sub-area details.

As a his­tor­i­cal note Sanders showed slides of early grid lay­outs – includ­ing early Sun­bury – and later curved street designs made pop­u­lar by Fred­er­ick Law Olm­sted. In early town and vil­lage lay­outs, there were mixed-uses and pedes­trian access to the core.

He also showed aer­ial views of today’s big box retail stores with out-lots, and exam­ples of the typ­i­cal mod­ern sub­ur­ban look. He said auto­mo­biles are a big rea­son we have devel­oped the way we have — park­ing is needed in each home, busi­ness, church and school.

Sanders said today’s pro­duc­tion builders cre­ate neigh­bor­hoods with houses that look the same. They sell well, he said, but builders and devel­op­ers serve the needs of their indi­vid­ual res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial mar­kets, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to cre­ate a hand­some, mixed-use envi­ron­ment that’s pedes­trian friendly.

Ide­ally we would cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties peo­ple want to live in, Sanders said. Those com­mu­ni­ties would encour­age phys­i­cal activ­ity (be walk­a­ble), reduce util­ity costs, be sus­tain­able, have shared park­ing, be aes­thet­i­cally appeal­ing, serve seniors, have pub­lic trans­porta­tion and exhibit age diversity.

“The result is a tra­di­tional neigh­bor­hood design today that’s called new urban­ism,” Sanders said. “Rich archi­tec­tural detail, a dense core, mixed uses and walk­a­ble, human scale and inti­mate. You want peo­ple to come to the area and spend more time there.”

Sanders dis­trib­uted a sur­vey devel­oped dur­ing the 2003-04 mas­ter plan meet­ings, sug­gest­ing that steer­ing com­mit­tee mem­bers review the sur­vey and decide if they want to adapt it in some form for dis­tri­b­u­tion as part of their process of updat­ing the exist­ing plan.

“Peo­ple can get sur­veyed out,” Sanders said. “But peo­ple want to be heard. They want to be able to say what’s impor­tant to the com­mu­nity and what’s not. This is a work­ing group; you can play with this. Ask your­self what kind of sur­vey you’re try­ing to evolve; and when you sur­vey make sure you get the right mix of people.”

Sun­bury Vil­lage Admin­is­tra­tor Dave Mar­tin said the steer­ing com­mit­tee should con­sider the zon­ing in sur­round­ing town­ships; what their zon­ing looks like as it touches Sunbury.

“The real­ity of it at the end of the day is, all of Big Wal­nut is one com­mu­nity,” Mar­tin said. “What we do here will impact prop­erty val­ues out­side of the village.”

Sun­bury Mayor Tommy Hat­field agreed with Martin.

“I feel the Sun­bury com­mu­nity has a lot of respon­si­bil­ity to the Big Wal­nut area,” Hat­field said. “We want to know our neighbor’s thoughts; we don’t want to do things in the back room. Sun­bury has lim­its, so how far out do we plan? To our bound­aries, or out­side of our boundaries?”

Hat­field said he also strug­gles with wel­com­ing a builder or busi­ness into the com­mu­nity because he wants to serve peo­ple who have lived in Sun­bury for 50 years and longer.

“All we can do is try to do some­thing right,” Hat­field added. “We’ve got to push on, and along the way make sure we do this right.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Nov 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.