Some land-use commissioners still want to scrap CodeNEXT and start over

A few months after the CodeNEXT draft text release is still not too late to do the whole thing over for some Zoning and Platting commissioners. At the May 2 meeting, Commissioner Bruce Evans said that the examples given by the CodeNEXT team of the ideal street corners and neighborhoods in the city were developed under the pre-1984 land-use code. He admitted that they couldn’t be re-created with the current code, but he doubted the CodeNEXT draft would be able to re-create those models either. “Why are we going through this effort without going back to see how we got those examples in the first place?” he asked. Commissioner Jim Duncan, who serves on the CodeNEXT Advisory Group, took the opposing view and defended the draft, imperfect as it may be. “As a planner I look at it structurally and substantively. Structurally, it needs a lot of work,” he said, “but like the mayor said: Everybody needs to chill out.”