12/13/1999 Meeting Minutes (2) - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting 12-13-99 Page 6 . motions for the votes. So, to keep this thing from being a back and forth, to keep it moving, that is the way we will handle it. Mayor Rinker said he is impressed that there are as many people as are here tonight. I must confess that based upon much of the discussion of the meetings I was able to attend and some of the commentary I hear tonight, I can see a very marked dichotomy between what people see as the road potential and what they fear as the road potential. I'm not sure we're going to be able to answer any of those questions or all those questions tonight. I'm going to ask you to bear with me a little bit, because this has been a project that, to me, has a profound impact on the community. There is nothing that any one of you has stated tonight that changes my view on that score; I don't think any of us would disagree. I listen very carefully to people who make comments about wanting to keep a Village, not to tear things up, not to destroy what is so important to all of us. Frankly, there were a lot of points that were made that I would like to be able to address and I cannot. I would suggest, however, to certain people who indicate that they are confused, that part of the problem we have is that this is not a simple issue. There is a lot of complication to it. It has taken quite a while to develop. It is kind of like a math problem. You have to understand what the math facts are before you start dealing with some of the equations. This doesn't take one sitting or two or three sittings to understand very easily. At least I don't believe it does. I think that from my standpoint I was very distressed that we came down to the latter part of this year and I felt it was very important to start convening some of these meetings. I would have hoped that other neighborhood meetings could have been convened before. There are a lot of things that I wish had been done sooner. But the fact of the matter is we have accomplished something to this point. I don't believe we are doing anything more than crossing a threshold and I firmly believe that as we look at this set of problems that we deal with, we can look at it either as the glass is half empty or the glass is half full. I have always been an advocate of the former. Mayor Rinker said ultimately, much of what we do as a Village comes down to land use. Municipalities in Ohio are empowered with a substantial amount of power to be able to control how land is used. Mayfield Village, back in the 60's, adopted a certain zoning scheme. For about the next 20-30 years, the Village (after having adopted that zoning scheme) decided to fight it and tried to get back a residential zoning in the Northwest Quadrant. If we learned anything from the 3 different cases that we lost in that battle, was .that it was very important to study what your land use patterns are to evaluate what it takes to maintain the kind of balance that you want in the face of the changes that are going on all around us. For those who moved out to the Village, recently or moved 40+ years ago, Mayfield Village, just like every other edge city in a major metropolitan area of the United States over the -last four decades, has had to fight urban sprawl. We have been very fortunate in many ways to keep a population that qualifies us legally as a Village, under 5,000 people. A number of years ago, this Administration adopted what I would honestly say was a very aggressive policy of trying to keep as much as possible the attributes and the legal status of keeping to be a Village. But, we also understood that there are economic challenges that face us and that given the zoning that we have.... Mrs. Shields, I would have loved to have kept fields across from your house, but the fact is, the zoning across from your house is the same zoning that Euclid has down along Route 2 and 90 on the shoreway.