In the New Year, the City Plan Commission is set to discuss possible changes related to: the rules requiring developers to add off-street parking to some new residential buildings, regulations guiding the development of polluting industries in the Port of Providence area, and whether to add rules that dictate how new developments must look.
At an Oct. 21 city council meeting where the comprehensive plan was discussed, Deputy City Planner Bob Azar told The Public’s Radio that this process could take months.
“Ideally, within the next three to six months, I’d like to say that we’ve made great progress in getting new regulations approved,” he said.
Most of the contentious issues the commission will discuss in 2025 are due to open-ended language in the comprehensive plan document – which serves as an outline and vision for projects, while the zoning ordinances provide specific laws for enacting that vision. For example, the language related to parking minimums says that the city should “prioritize the elimination of parking minimums wherever feasible.”
A spokesperson for the Providence City Council said that this language leaves it open to discussion, depending on what the commission determines feasible.
The spokesperson also said that the city council is very split on whether they want the elimination of parking minimums or not, adding that Council President Rachel Miller is in favor of banning parking minimums.
Those who would like to see less parking in the city say more parking lots means less permeability. In general, the city in its comprehensive plan is requesting more permeable space, which can act as a natural floodwater absorbent and help filter pollutants in stormwater and in the air.
Advocates of less parking also say additional parking lots mean less space for housing, and a general over-reliance on car culture – when, they say, in order to fight against climate change, our society requires less reliance on car culture and increased use of green forms of public transportation.
Transit advocate Dylan Giles said in a recent City Plan Commission meeting that more parking impedes the density that this comprehensive plan requires.
“We look forward to continuing our efforts to relieve the burden on housing production by advocating for the widespread reduction of parking minimums,” he said.
But others caution against what no parking minimums might mean for residential zones.
“Do we want to overwhelm our streets?” Azar said. “If you put in a 50-unit apartment building in the middle of a three-family zone, what does that mean for on-street parking for everybody else?”
For the Port of Providence, the city council spokesperson said the wiggle room in the comprehensive plan is “optimistically a transition out” of pollutive industries rather than a hard out, adding that the Port of Providence is a large area that employs many people.
Julian Drix, the chair of the city’s Sustainability Commission, might have a more progressive approach than some council members. He said at a city council meeting earlier this year that he will push for strict language in the zoning ordinances that ban more polluting industries. He said it was disappointing that the council didn’t more aggressively push for adding cleaner industries, since the comprehensive plan and zoning ordinances don’t necessarily address existing uses, but future ones.
“We already have so much pollution in this concentrated area. We have multiple fossil fuel import terminals, we have multiple asphalt facilities, we have multiple cement facilities, we have multiple chemical facilities, multiple hazardous waste facilities,” he said. “What we’re talking about doesn’t even get to addressing the conditions that are there.”
Drix said he plans to take these messages to the zoning battles in the new year.
In the New Year, the City Plan Commission will also look at adding a design review commission to dictate how new developments must look – which could appease constituents from the East Side, who often attend City Plan Commission meetings to complain about new developments not matching the character of a given neighborhood.
Once these items pass through the Providence City Plan Commission, they must also be addressed by the city council’s ordinance committee, which is likely to make their own edits. They would then go to Mayor Brett Smiley, who has already pushed back against one sustainability initiative: rules he found too stringent about new gas stations in the city.
The next Providence City Plan Commission meeting is scheduled for Jan. 21.