The Oversight Committee meeting last night was well-attended, both by members and by onlookers (many of whom spoke to the committee about various issues).

In order to carefully listen and evaluate all proposed changes, the meeting lasted 4 hours. It was 4 hours of hard, thoughtful work by all participants, and I couldn't help being struck by the comparison to a meeting that took place earlier in the day (and we managed to get through 4 hours w/o one single recess - imagine that!)

In the end, the committee (which is an advisory body) agreed (after including a few caveats and questions to be resolved) with the recommendations of the project consultants. Changes requested by five property owners represented by Arthur Seymour to raise building heights (from 70' to 100' in the SW-4 district and from 60' to 150' on the Holston Gases property) and to eliminate the setback requirement on upper stories of the tallest buildings were rejected. The committee also agreed to recommend keeping the size of the river buffer at 70' (the land owners were asking for a decrease to 50'), and rejected a request to eliminate the new River Road from the Holston Gases property.

The property owners also requested removing the maximum lot size requirement. This is set at 3 acres in order to prevent "superblocks" and support development of an urban street grid. The Committee also rejected this request in favor of retaining the maximum lot size.

The committee did agree to increase the maximum parking #s in some districts, but kept the maximum parking requirement (thus ensuring that #9 will call us fascist).

From memory, I can count 18 Committee members present and I may be leaving out one or two. On some issues there were one or two dissenters, so the consensus was not unanimous, but it was solid to overwhelming.

There were a few other technical and more narrow issues addressed, which I'll be happy to spell out for anybody who's interested.

The new version of the form-based code will be available tomorrow, Feb. 2. I presume it will be available on the City website, since every previous version has been published there. This is the version that will go to MPC on Feb. 8.

BTW, MPC Commissioners were invited to attend last night, especially since they postponed the code at their last meeting in order for the proposed changes to be addressed. Sadly, only five of the fifteen showed up. Thanks to Ray Evans, Trey Benefield, Herb Donalson, Art Clancy, and one other Commissioner who I can't identify.

If MPC approves the code on 2/8, it will be on Council agenda for first reading on 2/13.

Hayes Hickman covered the story for the KNS [1], and sat through all 4 hours, so kudos to him as well.