The City Council voted to indefinately table the Sudley Road sector plan last night.  I made the motion to table it.  The vote was unanimous.  The folks in Council Chambers applauded – that doesn’t happen very often!

I don’t believe the sector planning process is flawed or bad.  I believe in the planning process.  This particular sector plan was mainly my idea and when it was kicked off about 4 years ago, was a great idea.  Back then the biggest problem was the mistrust between the Hospital and their neighbors.  The sector planning process is normally very effective at bringing stakeholders together on issues.  Fast forward a couple of years in the planning process and the Heavy in the process, the Hospital, was sold.  Nobody around here knows what it is the Hospital wants to do.  In addition, ideas and opinions just weren’t converging and it seemed as though we would be hammering out big pieces of the plan at the dais.  That wasn’t happening – bad policy to do that.

The downside is that it cost us some money and all participants a fair amount of time.  The other downside is that if you have a sector plan around that lays out that vision, it can make future changes to the comprehensive plan a bit easier.  As it stands, the comprehensive plan remains in place and much of that land is zoned either B-4 and R-1.  Anyone that wants to change that now starts from square 1…which maybe ain’t the worst thing in the world either if points of view aren’t converging.

If there is an upside it is that, depsite the plan being shelved, maybe some of the ideas survive.  I suppose the lesson is that sometimes it just doesn’t work out.