God save us from experts and politicians.
Every time Richmond's Downtown Master Plan clears a major hurdle, someone decides that -- in the best interest of the city's relationship with VCU, or of an unidentified handful of constituents, or of a bevy of lawyers who happened to represent the right people, or of a subset of a subset of a business organization -- revisions must be made.
This time around, it's City Councilman Bruce Tyler. In his defense, City Council had all of three months (during an election, during the summer) to consider and approve the plan. But Tyler the politician can blame that on his expert friend Bob Mills, who as chairman of the Richmond Planning Commission helped slow the plan to a crawl. Council had three months to act on the plan; the planning commission took eight months to move the plan from draft to approval.
Style Weekly's Chris Dovi has more, including some out-of-hand comments that I made on Tyler's efforts to revise the plan:
After 14 months and endless public meetings, community workshops,
presentations and even public lessons on urban design that drew record
involvement from common residents, Richmond’s revised comprehensive
plan — passed unanimously by City Council at its Oct. 13 meeting —
represents a shared vision of Richmond’s future.
City Councilman Bruce Tyler does not share that vision.
In a memo circulated to fellow members shortly after the
meeting, Tyler gives his line-by-line review of 26 proposed revisions
to the comprehensive plan, better known as the city’s master plan,
identifying proposed edits and his reasons for each of those changes.
Among proposed changes: excising any attempt to interject design
requirements on development at Virginia Commonwealth University, or to
limit the school’s ability to close roads or alleys. Also heavily
amended would be measures in the plan to preserve views of the James
River or public access to the river, which the plan weighted in favor
of residents rather than developers.
The developer of the Echo Harbor project, a controversial
condominium project that would substantially alter the view from Libby
Hill, employed Tyler’s architectural firm for the past few years, but
Tyler’s objections to that portion of the master plan are stated
generally...
...But those proposals come late in the game, suggests [John] Sarvay, a local
blogger who took an active role in the plan’s development, chronicling
it in excruciating detail on his Web site, Buttermilk & Molasses,
and helping generate broader public interest in the process. He
questions Tyler’s motives, calling an 11th-hour move “gaming the
system.”
“This public process has been in play for 15 months. None
of these issues were raised until the last four months,” Sarvay says,
suggesting that even then objections similar to those raised by Tyler —
largely coming from the developers and large corporations with
riverfront presences like Dominion Resources and Ethyl Corp. — were
made in private. “Tyler seems to err almost universally on the side of
rights of developers. That’s his prerogative as a developer and an
architect — I don’t think that’s his prerogative as a representative of
the public."
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