News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Algood held a special called work session Thursday night to discuss land use, with an emphasis on flooding.
The meeting was spurred from a rezoning request that would add a third building to Quarry Run at 299 East Main Street. Building Inspector Bob Lane said ordinance changes are being composed to tackle water detention issues voiced by council members Ron Graves and Luke Hill.
“If somebody is going out here and doing something that’s in a pretty precarious place, as far as runoff, we’re going to ask them to do their water detention first before they start the structure,” Lane said. “That way we control that and we also get to see how well it works.”
Lane said another part of the preliminary ordinance changes are to prevent water being pushed out into the street, making developers either swale it or ditch it by sloping a driveway. Lane said to the council that while he is building inspector it will not bother him at all to stop a development if requirements are not being met.
Councilman Hill asked if there are flooding issues in Algood and he is hearing from residents that apartment development is also a concern, is it in Algood’s best interest to add more apartments?
City Administrator Keith Morrison said that if anyone on the council has concerns about the effects of a third building at Quarry Run, or any apartment development, the power is in the council’s hands.
“Number one, if you all choose not to rezone that property then they cannot put apartments on it,” Morrison said. “It’s not done, there’s no deal in the background. There’s no apartments coming unless you all do rezone it and then they will be a permitted use at that point. Number two, on the storm water controls we are looking at every way possible to tighten those up as best we can. One of the things we were talking about this afternoon is the use of impermeable surface and what we can require in the site plans to ensure that we know pre and post construction. How much impermeable surface is there, so that we ensure that storm water runoff is equal to or less than it was at pre-construction.”
Impermeable means that a fluid cannot pass through. Morrison continued to address the work going towards fixing storm water issues.
“We have put in the storm water management plan that construction and drainage improvements must be completed at the beginning of the project,” Morrison said. “I have the control to where the discharge from the pond can be so that we ensure that anything downstream is not adversely affected. We require the design return interval to be 100 years or less in areas deemed critical or in cases where the design will result in small increase in facility size. So these are all things that we’ve been looking at putting in place and trying to get prepared to do that.”
Lane said that there are roughly 500 apartments in Algood right now. Hill asked Planning Director Tommy Lee if they could get a ratio of the housing breakdown in Algood. Lee said he could get data on the number of single family homes versus the number of all other residential structures by the next council meeting.
Morrison said that these ordinances would have to go before the planning commission before they can be voted on by the city council. However, the preliminary changes were printed and presented to the full council on Thursday night.
