MELFORT— The City of Melfort is looking into allowing the development of garden and garage suites as well as the use of mixed-zoning.
This is a part of the city updating their official community plan (OCP) and zoning bylaw. This new document has been in the works for two years.
The classification of mixed-zoning would allow a property to be used for both commercial and residential uses.
“One example would be say, on the... block on Burrows Avenue East, you’ll see a transition from commercial to residential,” said Heather Audette, Melfort’s city clerk. “So it would actually be to create a mixed-use zone that would permit additional use in those areas, in those transitioning areas.”
Other items in the document include requiring hard surface parking on residential sites where the access from a street of lane is hard surfaced, maximizing the width of a driveway in residential areas to 60 per cent of the site width, restricting the maximum coverage of a driveway in the front yard, as well as restricting the number of unlicensed vehicles.
The zoning bylaw deals with land use and the OCP sets out a future development plan for the city. Audette said the two parts are complementary to each other.
The OCP contains projections for what they believe the city populations in the future, as well as gaps in service that can be addressed through the zoning bylaw.
Based on the average annual growth rate data from Statistics Canada, the City of Melfort projects the city will reach about 10,000 people by 2036.
The previous time the document was updated and passed was in 1996.
“A lot of things changed since then,” Audette said.
These documents were shown at an open house organized by the city, with the goal of receiving feedback from residents on April 29.
“It’s part of the public consultation process that’s required when you’re passing a new OCP and zoning bylaw,” Audette said. “Tonight we are wanting to get feedback on some specific questions.”
The questions are if residents support the before-mentioned aspects of the document including mixed-zoning, garage suites and driveway rules.
“These will directly affect people’s properties so it’s important to get feedback to see what kind of support we get for some of these new initiatives.”
The current step for the city is to get feedback from the public. After this they will move from the draft document to the official document, which will go to council for first reading.
“There will still be a chance for people to weigh in after first reading as well, because we won’t be passing it.”
The document will then move onto the final reading at a later date.
Audette hopes that the document will be ready for first reading for June and final reading for July.
The document is available online and at the city hall.
