The Chardon Planning Commission gave Frontier Land Group LLC the go-ahead to begin the first phase of the Maple Trace subdivision at their meeting Jan. 23.
The Chardon Planning Commission gave Frontier Land Group LLC the go-ahead to begin the first phase of the Maple Trace subdivision at their meeting Jan. 23.
The housing development will be built on a 40-acre parcel abutting the Woods of Burlington, near the southern edge of the city.
Mark Holz, president of FLG, said once approved by Chardon City Council at their meeting Feb. 8, Ryan Homes can start building a model home.
“Assuming everything goes as planned, they’re planning on starting on Feb. 19 and they would have a grand opening on May 1,” Holz said. “We anticipate they’ll sell somewhere between 15 and 20 homes in that first month and then they’ll start buying, you know, three or four at a time by the middle, the end of June and continue until they’re sold out.”
Holz said Ryan Homes will wait until a lot is purchased to being building a home.
“They’ll literally buy the lot in the morning and start digging the basement in the afternoon,” he said.
The commission also heard from Willo Tree development, which is planning to build a housing development on three parcels surrounding a cul-de-sac on Meadowlands Drive. The first phase will see 49 of the 122 total homes built, according to plans submitted to the city.
Community Development Administrator Steve Yaney said the next step in the project is the submission of construction documents for the first phase.
After a lengthy discussion over whether and where the development should be paved, commission Chair Andy Blackley asked City Engineer Doug Courtney about plans for a sanitary sewer pump station.
“We had batted around the idea before of potentially building a gravity sewer,” Blackley said. “We’re putting a pump station here, pumping this (waste) uphill and there’s a gravity sewer how many feet? A thousand feet down Water Street they could potentially tie into?”
Courtney said capacity issues in the section of sewer nearest the development would not have the capacity to handle the new development.
A roughly $800,000 project to update the pump station on that section is on the city’s unfunded list, he said.
“I just would like the city to maintain a dialogue with the developer before this pump station actually gets built,” Blackley said. “We can talk about expediting a project to put a gravity sanitary in. The other property across the street needs it, as well.”
The planning commission approved the preliminary plan after giving feedback on landscaping and other concerns to developer Rollin Cooke III.
To close the meeting, Yaney introduced a proposed amendment to completely rewrite part 11 of the city’s planning and zoning code.
“The last time this was updated was between 2008 and 2010,” Yaney said. “So, we’re at about 14 years since the last time it was revised.”
Yaney said the rewrite took into account comments made during joint sessions between planning commission and city council.
The city is getting rid of some zoning districts in the new plan and some parcels will move from one zoning district to another after the changes, Yaney said.
Law Director Ben Chojnacki said the commission will put together a comprehensive zoning map amendment to complement changes made to the text of the zoning code. With that done, city council could choose to adopt both sets of changes in parallel.
Yaney said if the changes are adopted at next month’s planning commission meeting, city council could approve the update as early as its March meeting.
