Budget proposal development-friendly

DRAPER -- Mel Sweeney, a Draper resident with a dream of opening a corner coffee shop, is welcoming changes in the city's 2005-06 city budget meant to make development easier. He said the current situation could use some help.

"You go in and ask for a request to change your zone, and it goes from meeting to meeting to meeting," he said in the middle of a lengthy process to get approval for his shop. "This is like the fourth City Council meeting I've been to."

And while he said he doesn't know if budget changes will solve all his problems with the council, he said simplifying the process couldn't hurt.

That has been the general review from many involved for Draper's new budget, which includes provisions to make the city more development- friendly. It is even meeting with approval from some residents who have recently criticized the city for catering too much to developers.

"I'm all for making it simple," Dick Robinson, chairman of Draper's South Mountain Homeowners Association, said. Robinson assailed the city last year in a development dispute for ignoring taxpayer input and responding more readily to the demands of developers. But Robinson said he is not anti-development, as long as that development is controlled.

Draper officials are considering a new budget that would create a new department and rearrange some employees in hopes of streamlining the developing process.

"All these changes are growth-related," said city finance director Michael Sears.

The change would move five functions, including legal services and information technology, that are currently administered by the city manager and make them a separate administrative services department, governed by a department head.

Sears said the change is designed to free the city manager to deal with development issues, the City Council and a handful of other concerns.

Officials also want to move the engineering budget into the Development Services Department rather than in public works. Sears said that would reflect the fact that the engineers are much busier with development than with maintenance.

A third, more subtle, change is the plan to move the city recorder under the Finance Department. This, Sears said, should eliminate some work duplication and thus help growth-related items move from paperwork to the meeting agendas in a more timely way.

An additional move, already taken place, that will be reflected in the 2005-06 budget is moving economic development directly under the purview of the city manager. Sears said the city manager's job relates closely enough to development that in past years, people who came to talk to economic development personnel would usually leave that office and go straight to the city manager's office.

The new arrangement would simplify the process by allowing everything to happen in the same office, Sears said.

While many are supporting the simplifying process, many are saying the city needs to improve in the development planning, not just the paperwork process.

Robinson said the city needs to maintain open space and stay away from high-density housing.

"We have to be careful what we put in," he said. "High density isn't good. Tax base goes up but quality of life goes down."

Sweeney said development in the city doesn't always make sense, and Draper is becoming a "little Park City" with property taxes to match. But in the end, he said, simplifying the process will probably help.

"If they're organized a little bit better," he said, "they can move forward with Draper being one of the nicer areas of the Salt Lake Valley. That's why we moved here."

E-mail: dhinckley@desnews.com

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