How does North Augusta maintain the unique characteristics of its downtown without getting restrictive to the point of impeding future investment and without future development being subject to the whims of politics?
That’s the challenge before North Augusta City Council as the final scrutiny approaches in what has been an almost three-year process of re-writing the city’s development code.
A public hearing on the document has been set for Sept. 11, after which it will be subject to two readings. The city could adopt the new code as early as October if Council requests no modifications to it.
When Council does adopt the new regulations, it will codify the first major overhaul in development guidelines since the existing code went into effect 15 years ago, in 2008.
That was a year before Riverside Village and SRP Park, before any indication that the old Carpet Shop would have a second future and before Jackson Square went up on Georgia Avenue.
“Downtown’s so different,” councilman Eric Presnell mused during an Aug. 14 work session. McNeely’s looks “totally different than the North Augusta motel right beside it — and then the Waffle House right beside it. And then University Hospital.”
The character of downtown has been built piece by piece by the demands of the market as these demands have fit within the boundaries of successive development codes.
Sometimes, with more laxity than others: Mayor Briton Williams noted that Jackson Square, home to Cavalier’s Coffeehouse and Antonio’s, could not have been built prior to the existing code.
Even with that increased leniency, the question that prompted city officials to pursue a rewrite of North Augusta’s development code, as Williams earlier told Post and Courier, was one of whether current regulations were too restrictive.
That question remains.
Balance of vision, leniency
One of the biggest changes to the code is the removal of zoning district overlays, which have provided additional design standards for certain areas of North Augusta, notably downtown.
Tandem with that removal of the overlays is that these additional standards have been folded into the base zoning.
It’s left Williams wondering whether that’s an effective way to spur new investment.
“It doesn’t do us any good to take the word ‘overlay’ and take it out as a district if we keep everything that was codified by the name of ‘overlay,’” Williams said. To keep everything that made an overlay district what it is, he said, only means that “the district overlay wasn’t the problem. It was what the code said of the district.”
Some of the changes in the code would, if adopted, provide some cushion. Conditional uses would no longer require a public hearing, just that a list of criteria are met. Older buildings that need some rehab would also get a bit of leeway in a nod to historic preservation.
And the stretch of Georgia Avenue from Buena Vista up would stop requiring off-street parking, allowing a developer to build from property line to property line and thereby allowing for more business density and a greater return on investment for the builder.
Williams said that building leniency into the code itself, rather than having developers go through the process of obtaining a waiver or variance from the Board of Zoning Appeals — a body that planning director Tommy Paradise has said is already bombarded with requests — could make development along Georgia Avenue more attractive.
“My concern is future development,” he said, adding that “it doesn’t do us any good” to have the new code if those wanting to invest in North Augusta are subject to the same restrictions that under the existing code had stymied other development.
But what this might look like is a little nebulous.
More power could be given to the city’s planning department over such things as design standards or how far back from the street a building can be, with approval granted for requests that fit the intention of the code if not the letter.
Councilman Presnell alluded that such a move could easily become political if development were considered on an almost case-by-case basis.
Already, one local developer, Jason Whinghter, who is also a former North Augusta City Councilman, has warned the same, having done so at the planning commission’s own public hearing.
No changes for clear cutting, mass grading
Things unlikely to be considered during Council’s upcoming review are the highly contentious subjects of clear cutting and mass grading; neither is addressed in the new code.
Councilman Kevin Toole, who was part of the initial subcommittee tasked with guiding the direction of the rewrite, said he was uncertain whether these topics had ever been talked about in-depth.
“That’s a conversation in standards that Council needs to come up with and set forth,” he said, with emphasis on the word “Council.” Toole said these were bigger issues that would eventually have to be confronted.
