AURORA | For the past two years, the City of Aurora has been working to update what many have called an overly-complicated zoning code.
“Aurora is not one place, it is many different places,” said Don Elliot with Clarion Associates LLC at a study session Monday, Feb. 29.
City staff have paid Clarion Associates, LLC $380,000 since 2014 to create a more user-friendly zoning code by updating zoning districts and land uses, and improving the city’s development standards.
Those places within Colorado’s third-largest city, he said, include the pre-1960s denser neighborhoods that exist largely west of Interstate 225 in Original Aurora, the neighborhoods built between 1960 and 2000 that are larger with fewer alleys and all of the recent development that has occurred east toward Denver International Airport.
As part of Clarion’s proposal, the city would retain and strengthen its mixed-use Original Aurora district, simplify transit-oriented development districts, collapse the city’s four industrial districts into two districts, and consolidate more than a dozen E-470 and Northeast Plains subareas into seven districts.
Much of the code, Elliot said, would apply to developing the large swath of city land near E-470 and Denver International Airport. That’s in addition to making it easier for developers looking to do work along the Regional Transportation District’s Aurora Line and East Rail Line, both which are set to open this year.
Most of the code updates would not affect existing residential neighborhoods, he said.
Tareq Waifaie, a planner with Clarion Associates, presented a module Monday on what the city should do to update its development standards. He said the city needed to write a code that would create better access and connectivity within Aurora neighborhoods, make parking in commercial districts easier for residents and prevent commercial traffic from spilling into residential neighborhoods.
Ward IV Councilman Charlie Richardson pointed to the council recently approving a 424-unit apartment complex near the Regional Transportation District’s future Iliff Station as an example of the divide between where planning and zoning rules are now and where they need improvement.
“If Aurora is a hotel and you don’t want any vampires in your hotel, do you put a sign up at the front door of your hotel that says ‘No vampires,’ or do you put a big cross and sunlight lamps that you can’t turn off in every room?” Richardson asked. “Do put a sign up on the front door, or do you discourage it?”
Elliot said he would choose the second option, to write the type of development city council members want into the code.
“Plans and policies tell your people what you want them to do,” Elliot said.
Richardson was among the seven-member majority that approved the apartment complex, citing that the developer had been led to believe over nine years that three-story walkups would be allowed in that area.
The city currently has 66 zoning districts, 14 overlay districts and 20 planned community zoned districts, or PCZDs. Some are created for only a few blocks of a specific street, some districts are nearly the same, and some are never used, according to the consultant’s findings.
Public drafts of the code will be posted on the city’s website at https://www.auroragov.org/DoingBusiness/CityPlanning/ZoningCodeUpdate/index.htm through this summer. The city is planning to adopt the new code later this fall following the public input.