COPPERAS COVE — After more than two hours of discussion Tuesday and years of planning and revisions, the Copperas Cove City Council voted unanimously last week to table action on the adoption of a new zoning ordinance to Oct. 17.
Council members carefully considered the remarks residents made during Tuesday’s council meeting, though not all wanted to table the action.
The unanimous vote to table immediately followed a failed vote to adopt the ordinance during the council meeting Tuesday night.
Councilmen Shawn Alzona, Manuel Montanez and Jack Smith voted in favor of adopting the new ordinance. Councilwomen Joann Courtland and Vonya Hart as well as Councilmen Fred Chavez and John Hale voted against adopting the ordinance.
The public hearing and vote Tuesday came at the end of a three-year process that began with the adoption of a comprehensive plan for the city in 2020.
In a nutshell, comprehensive plans outline the vision of the city in terms of land use and the city’s priorities.
In October 2021, the city hired the services of Kendig Keast Collaborative — a Sugar Land-based multidisciplinary planning firm — to assist with overhauling the zoning ordinance to make it easier to understand and more user-friendly.
The future land use plan is Chapter 2 of the most recent comprehensive plan the city adopted in March 2020.
Like many other cities in Central Texas, Copperas Cove has been growing in recent decades — from a population of 29,592 in 2000 to an estimated population of 38,211 on Jan. 1, 2023.
According to the city, zoning is a tool that municipalities use to implement their adopted comprehensive plans to govern “land uses,” the size of buildings, and how buildings relate to their surroundings, including other buildings, open spaces, and the street.
“In the U.S., zoning began as a tool to separate land uses from one another, and in particular, was used to separate more impactful uses such as manufacturing from the more sensitive residential uses,” the city’s comprehensive plan says.
Hart and Courtland were the first to speak up about possibly tabling the adoption based on comments they had heard.
One common topic addressed in the meeting and the preceding Planning & Zoning Commission meeting on Aug. 28 was a potential requirement for homes to have trees in the front yard.
City resident Jared Stokes spoke against the proposed requirement Tuesday.
“If I have a $300,000 house, for example, any additional cost — and this is what a couple of the advisory members brought up — is passed on to the consumer,” Stokes said. “So, my $300,000 house now becomes a $301,000 or $302,000 home because every requirement that you all — the city adds — that anybody adds, is an additional cost.”
Toward the end of his comments during the public hearing, Stokes pitched the idea to the council about tabling the vote.
“I was under the impression that tonight would be the adoption of this without any further discussion because it was reiterated that by law there was only one meeting that had to be held for public discussion,” Stokes said. “Before you adopt it, you should seriously consider allowing the public, reiterating that messaging (and) making sure you’ve dotted your ‘I’s’ and crossed your ‘T’s’, that you’ve heard from every citizen.”
After the dust settled from the discussion, it seemed as though Chavez’s vote against immediate adoption was one of the pivotal ones.
“I wasn’t in favor of tabling when this all began, but I’m there now,” Chavez said during the discussion and after having heard concerns from the residents. “What I’d like to do — and I’m not saying throw it all away; I’m not saying it wasn’t great work because it was — but we need to take a step back, look at it and our governing documentation that does apply to all of these things — do they coalesce, do they work well together.
“I’m not talking about a unified code — not at all … I don’t want one, but I do want to make sure that we don’t have things that are contradictory toward each other and making everybody’s lives — developers, homeowners and the like — more difficult.”
Along with the issue about whether trees should be required or not, other residents brought concerns about other things, such as drainage. One resident discussed how the topography of the city makes some neighborhoods susceptible to flooding when adjacent developments are going on.
Another resident and business owner, Jay Manning, a former city councilman, spoke about his concern that the zoning ordinance may end up looking like a development code.
“We need regulation, but we don’t need overregulation,” Manning said. “I’m in a position to see what I believe that most people would consider overregulation, and they would be very angry if they knew how much that added to the cost of their house.”
Manning owns Manning Homes, a local homebuilding company based in Copperas Cove.
Manning was part of the committee that helped rewrite the ordinance, but even he doesn’t agree with everything in it.
“Most of these things have been mentioned; I’m not going to go back and rehash the residential part of it,” he said. “I thought that it was very interesting that a comment was made in this that it’s not a unified development code. Well, it’s very interesting Article 4 and Article 6 have the word ‘development’ in it and the tables that have to do with development.
“When we come to do zoning, we want to do zoning. We don’t need somebody to tell us we can’t do zoning because they want us to do something else. When you get the zoning, then you can start making development plans. Until you have it, you don’t really have anything when you’re working with land.”
City Manager Ryan Haverlah addressed some of the concerns that residents had and told the city council that many of their comments related to other city regulations, not the zoning ordinance.
“Some of the comments you received, it’s actually applicable to a different set of ordinances in our Code of Ordinances,” Haverlah said. “So if that’s something you’d want to consider, that would have to be a future agenda item request.”
Gaining confirmation from Copperas Cove Development Services Director Bobby Lewis, Haverlah stated that comments such as preventing the razing of all trees are better suited for discussion about the subdivision ordinance.
Other common concerns were a word the proposed ordinance calls “nonconforming” to describe properties that are in compliance with the current zoning ordinance but may not be with the new one when it is adopted.
“Under our current code that we have now, the nonconforming use is established when you have something that doesn’t meet the current code,” Lewis said. “Our current code is 16 years old. Even at that time, there was a lot of nonconformities that didn’t conform with the 2007 zoning ordinance.
“And with that, if you were designated as a nonconformity, you can’t expand on that nonconformity. This code expands on that — or at least makes it less restrictive where you can go to the board of adjustment and expand on a nonconforming use on a property.”
When given an opportunity, Courtland explained why she wanted to table the item.
“I heard a lot of: we have our zoning regulation, we have our subdivision ordinance as well as our construction standards,” she said. “That’s three out of potentially more documents … has anyone taken the time to abut those three documents to see where they overlap, where we’re saying different things in one versus the other and where the conflicts are?
“Has anyone really taken a hard look to see where they overlap, to see where they meet in the middle, where they do agree and where they disagree? Because I don’t think, as of right now, it doesn’t sound like they’re meshing very well with regards to what I’ve been listening to this evening.”
Lewis responded affirmatively and told Courtland that the city has “hyperlinked” the requirements from the zoning ordinance in an effort to make it more easily accessible and more user friendly.
Courtland still had concerns.
“Not being a builder, not being a developer, (I’m) just trying to figure out where we can make it easier across our documentation,” Courtland said. “I got it that the hyperlinks are there, and that’s great for a user and if you’re looking for something specific, but I’m looking at holistically how are we handling new construction, new commercial, new residential?”
In contrast to Courtland, Smith, who is a real estate agent, was in favor of approving the ordinance Tuesday evening.
Smith, in fact, made the motion for the initial vote, which Alzona seconded.
During his comments after making the motion, Smith addressed specific concerns from residents about the trees.
“I was going to point out (that) I’ve driven through the new neighborhoods, and if you see, they’ve been planting the trees anyway,” he said. “They’re putting trees into a lot of new neighborhoods that are being built.
“And I think it’s important to get the zoning ordinance updated for future developers that are looking at the city and they can go to this ordinance — it’s an easy ordinance to follow; it has a lot of illustrations. I think they did a great job over the last three years writing it.
“I also know we can change it at next month’s meeting if we choose to. We can have a public hearing and make any changes next month, the month after — just like we have to the previous zoning ordinance over the years. We haven’t done a comprehensive overhaul of it like this in 15 years, but there have been changes over the years. And there’s been additions to it and things taken away from it.
“So, I think it’s important for future people moving here to be able to look at a document, see what’s required of them if they’re planning on coming here and building, putting in a subdivision or even improving their house or changing it.”
As the council prepares to hear the item again on Oct. 17, Kendig Keast may no longer be part of briefing the council as their $163,306 contract was exhausted with Tuesday’s meeting, according to Lewis.
To offer comments to Copperas Cove City Council members between now and Oct. 17, residents can email them. The email addresses for the council members are:
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