Plan teases city’s future
Interested residents attend the Bandera Community Roundup presented by Simple City Design last week. BULLETIN PHOTO/ Cari Golyzniak
On September 2, Simple City Design hosted a Community Roundup presentation at Bandera’s Best Western hotel.
Simple City Design, procured by the City of Bandera, is a firm out of San Marcos, TX specializing in city planning and design, city management and economic development while working with city government and engaging with the community.
Simple City’s comprehensive plan for Bandera aims to create coded development standards for the city, identify and capture the culture and natural settings of Bandera, continue public engagement and keep Bandera Bandera.
At Thursday’s meeting, the hotel conference room was at full capacity with interested parties, the overflow of people having to stand alongside the walls.
Presenters Matt Lewis and Linda Hamilton presented a long-term vision for Bandera through 2040.
They highlighted Bandera’s unique natural settings and their plan to emphasize and preserve them, showed a map and explanation of Bandera’s six distinctive character districts, then methodically proposed new place type zoning, which is not typical to traditional municipal zoning.
Their City of Bandera Zoning Translation Map allowed city residents to look at where they are now and where they will be in the rezoned areas.
In a Q&A session that followed, some citizens voiced their concern about where these endeavors would be funded from and if the costs and rezoning proposals would affect county residents or city residents.
In response, Simple City confirmed that the funds would come from sales tax and commercial property taxes. They added only the city of Bandera residents would be affected.
Linda Hamilton stressed this plan is a cumulative vision that will be worked over the span of many years, and certain initiatives will be required before others, such as moving the water treatment plant out of the flood zone area.
Water conservation in Bandera City was another topic of discussion.
On September 7, the city council will meet to review the rezoning plan with Simple City.
Should the process move forward, rezoning notifications to be sent out to Bandera City residents on October 1. Workshops and public hearings will continue after that through November until November 16, when the will consideration of adopting the plan.