Signal Mountain, Tennessee Issues and Happenings

On Friday, May 1 we had our monthly agenda meeting. While these meetings were originally established to review the agenda for the upcoming Monday night meeting, they have evolved into work sessions where citizens and others with business before the town can make presentations and where the town manager can present and discuss various issues. Frankly, without these meetings our Monday night meetings would last until Tuesday (at least). These meetings (like all our meetings) are open to the public. However, because they are sparsely attended (even by the press), much of this business receives insufficient attention. Part of my goal in this blog is to provide this business to a broader audience.

On type of business sometimes taken care of in these meetings are second readings of ordinances. This is usually only done with those that are either time-sensitive or seem minor and non-controversial. At a recent public meeting, the council passed some amendments to our tree board ordinance clarifying rules for "honor trees". We had planned to complete these ordinances at the agenda meeting, however we received some emails raising concern from some folks who weren't fully aware of the tree board and its intent. For this reason, I asked the Council to hold off on a second reading until the next Monday night meeting and they agreed.

We had a presentation from the WWTA on the upcoming private service line program (PSLP). The full details are in the Chattanoogan.com (http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_150341.asp), but basically the WWTA will be replacing damaged sewer lines which extend from private homes to connect with the main sewer lines. This is a program which will be done all over Hamilton County, but start on Signal Mountain. This is to hopefully improve the "I&I" problem of excess water entering the sewer system during rainfall. The WWTA has done much work on their main lines which unfortunately does not seem to have had a major impact on this problem. The good news, however is that the E. Coli in our streams seems to be improving based on sampling done by the Stormwater Dept. While most of this problem is felt to be due to failing septic tanks, it appears that there may be some contribution from the sewer system which is improving.

We then discussed some minor changes in the "chicken ordinance" which clarified some things about setback variances that had bothered me, too. Thanks to Annette Allen for bringing this up and helping to fix this problem (which will be discussed at the Monday night meeting). We have been asking the DRC to do some major revisions to our sign and other commercial ordinances and Honna Rogers suggested she help to develop some updated guidelines for them to consider. This was appreciated by the Council. This is important as the Council anticipates some future commercial proposals coming its way.

Honna presented some budget ideas for us to consider including reviewing the staffing at the Recycling Center (we plan to continue working with Orange Grove to improve customer service) and a proposal for taking garbage service out of property taxes and having a dedicated "garbage fee" as most towns do. There is much to like about that idea, but there are also issues to consider in the transition so we asked her to present much more information and details before we would begin to look at it. There will clearly be a broad discussion about this if we decide to move forward.

Honna continues to propose ideas for making our services more efficient and automating some processes which are currently done manually. These are all great ideas and are moving our town forward. We are in the process of reviewing her first year of service to our town and preparing a longer term contract for her. There will be more on this as we each give our input to this process.

In discussing the agenda for the upcoming Monday Council meeting, the issue of the SROZ raised its ugly head again. Annette proposed we once again ask the Planning Commission to recommend that we repeal the SROZ (the first step in that process). This will be the third time the Planning Commission has been asked to do this. Both previous times they decided to hold off until they had finished their process of revising our subdivision regulations, which is to be followed by a comprehensive revision of our zoning regs. My position is the same as it has been since I ran for Council. I want to replace our current zoning regs, which are based on old-fashioned and sprawl-enhancing lot-size-based development concepts, with modern ideas utilizing density-based zoning based on the advice we got from Randall Arendt. This will be a complicated process. My position is that we should do this all at once, replace the SROZ with a whole new process. I don't think we need to move backwards before moving forward. The moratorium is still in place and doesn't seem likely to go away soon, so no development can occur anyway. I should note that the only development done under the new rules (with minimum 1/3- acre lots) has a density much less than 2 homes per acre. I will be preparing a comprehensive reply for Monday's meeting and will post it here after that. Zoning changes are always painful and fraught with controversy. The last time we went through this it nearly tore this town apart. I think we need to do it again, but don't want to do it twice. That is my position.

Finally, I read in the paper this morning that Mayor Lusk stated that "We would be extraordinarily interested" in consolidating our water service with Chattanooga (emphasis mine). As mayor I was always careful to differentiate between my personal views and when I was speaking for the Council. As a matter of fact, the council frequently felt that the two could not be separated and that any public statement of mine was automatically speaking for the Council as a whole and should be approved by the entire Council. This process is no longer followed. While there have been some very general discussions about consolidation of various services, we have certainly made no decisions on that issue and taken no vote. I myself have mixed feelings and would require much information before even making a decision (though I would not want to sell our water company as long as the local utility is owned by a private company). I think that there is more sense in sewer consolidation. It seems clear that Mayor Lusk was expressing his personal opinions (and if he is having private conversations on this with other members of the Council, that is unfortunate and hopefully not the case). I also realize that what is in the paper does not always express exactly what you wanted it to. I hope he will be more careful with his public pronouncements in the future.