Onondaga Settlement plan has effect

Slowly but surely, local governments in the Syracuse, New York, area are implementing ideas that Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) introduced during an October 1999 charrette. The DPZ-prepared Settlement Plan for Onondaga County has still not been formally adopted, but Karen Kitney, director of the Syracuse-Onondaga County Planning Agency, says its principles underlie much of the agency’s work.

The agency is now completing a Main Street Corridor Plan and draft zoning for the Village of Solvay, based on strategies in the Settlement Plan. “The villages of Baldwinsville, Liverpool, and Skaneateles have completed planning, zoning, or capital projects to implement Settlement Plan strategies,” Kitney notes.

The Settlement Plan — the nation’s first regional plan and set of codes based entirely on the Transect — contains a toolbox of strategies aimed at encouraging New Urbanism. Included is a model code that any of the county’s 35 municipalities can adopt. Two of the county’s 19 towns — DeWitt and Tully — were awarded county grants to integrate the concepts into local planning and zoning. Independently, the Village of Skaneateles commissioned planning consultant Joel Russell to devise TND code standards.

The Settlement Plan has also influenced the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is working with two suburban towns on efforts aimed at generating “true local street networks and mixed land use and mixed housing options” in developing areas, according to Kitney.

In Syracuse itself, pressure from a large developer, Pyramid Companies, has limited the progress of new urbanist planning. Russell, in cooperation with the local planning firm EDR, had prepared a Transect-based code for more than 600 acres in the Syracuse Inner Harbor area, and the city adopted it, along with a regulating plan with Transect zones and street sections. But Pyramid demanded that DestiNY USA, a proposed $2.6 billion retail and entertainment complex, be exempted from new urbanist standards. “If DestiNY goes kaput, which is still a distinct possibility, the underlying code may yet have its day,” says Russell.

Kitney now expects that the county will formally adopt the Settlement Plan in 2007, simultaneous with the next update of the countywide comprehensive plan.