THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 1, 1996 TAG: 9605010383
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
Picture this: You're sitting on your couch, watching the Bulls demolish the Heat, and the pizza delivery guy arrives.
Along with the extra cheese and pepperoni pie, he hands you a flier from the Virginia Beach Planning Department.
Do you read the flier?
Or continue to watch hoops?
The game will give you a few jolts of adrenalin, a scream, a shriek, a groan here and there.
The flier could help you change your city's future; to decide which empty lots become city parks and which turn into shopping centers; to suggest where new homes should be built or farmland preserved.
All that in a pizza box?
To reach as many people as possible, the Planning Department is hoping to stuff pizza boxes during the NBA playoffs with fliers advertising 17 upcoming public meetings.
The district's 76,000 school children will also be given fliers to take home. The meetings are designed to get residents to say what they like and what they don't like about their city's development.
The city recently started a year-long review of the Beach's comprehensive plan, its blueprint for future growth. But instead of just listening to policymakers, planners and special interest groups, the Planning Department wants to hear from moms, dads - even pizza lovers.
The comprehensive plan helps outline where private development should go and where it shouldn't. And it helps decide where the city will spend its money on parks, libraries, recreation centers and roads.
The plan doesn't legislate change - only the zoning ordinance says what can be built and what can't - but it should point the city in the right direction.
When plans were written in 1971, 1979, 1985 and 1991, Virginia Beach was exploding from a medium-sized community of 150,000 people to the 425,000-resident behemoth it is today. Population growth over the next five years is not expected to be nearly as strong.
This slowdown gives the city an opportunity to focus on quality of life instead of growth control. Instead of building schools and roads after the kids and cars have arrived, the city can - for the first time in its history - really plan for the future, Beach officials say.
``(Before), we were struggling simply to keep up with the hectic pace of growth,'' Thomas C. Pauls, comprehensive planning coordinator, said Monday.
By the time the pace of development picks up again, he said, ``we will have in place the kind of policies and land-use planning guidance needed to manage that growth, in terms of form and function - the way it looks and the way it works.''
The City Council and Planning Commission have laid out basic ground rules for the plan: it must further the council's vision for a family-oriented community, keep development under control, and promote job growth but not residential construction.
In the go-go '70s and '80s, the city allowed too many subdivisions to be built, planners say. Now, although property taxes may seem high, most homeowners get back more than they pay in roads, schools, sewers and other city services. Generally, owners of houses worth less than $200,000 - about 90 percent of Virginia Beach homes - are a net drain on the tax base. So the next round of development should encourage more tax- and job-generating businesses than service-demanding residents, city officials have said.
The new plan could encourage village-type development, for instance, with shops and offices built near homes. That would cut down on traffic and let people live near where they work, but it's not allowed under current city regulations, Planning Commission Chairman Robert H. Vakos said.
The Planning Commission and City Council have set broad goals for the comprehensive plan - that it should help make the city safer and better looking, by requiring community playgrounds to be in the center of neighborhoods, where parents can easily watch over children, rather than at the end of a street.
Beyond those general guidelines, the ideas generated at the 17 public meetings will shape the final plan, staff members say. ``If you see undeveloped land out your back window, wonder what traffic's gonna be like in 10 years, or whether the water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and other tributaries is going to improve or degrade - these are things people can have a direct impact on by coming out and talking about them,'' Pauls said.
For the last comprehensive plan, the city held hearings where residents with specific interests could address the 11-member Planning Commission. This time, the idea is to hold less formal get-togethers where citizens can talk at length about the kind of neighborhood and the kind of city they want to live in, Planning Commission Chairman Vakos said.
To show it is taking residents' ideas seriously, the Planning Department is holding meetings in school cafeterias all over town in the next two months. City employees, civic leagues, churches and school children will be handed or mailed fliers.
This fall, the city will go back out to the 17 communities with a draft of the plan to show what has been done with the public comments. ``This is for their future, for their children's future, for their business' future. . . . It's important stuff,'' Pauls said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
MEETING SCHEDULE
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB