Summit County Planning Department staff praised East Side landowners for their forward-thinking endeavor to create a new town near Hoytsville that some hope will serve as a model for similar projects in the future.
The Eastern Summit County Planning Commission updated elected officials about the status of the Cedar Crest Village Overlay project during a joint meeting with the Summit County Council on Wednesday. In mid-February, representatives from the village overlay committee, which consists of 25 Hoytsville property owners, presented a draft for future land use to the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission. However, the meeting was the same night as a highly anticipated North Summit Fire District meeting, which led to a lower turnout than expected.
“We’ve been at this a long time: establishing where we believe our strengths and weaknesses, our opportunities and our challenges are going to be,” said Patrick Putt, the county’s community development director. “This will be a constant theme threading through the work product we’ve produced to date.”
The purpose of a village overlay is to revitalize and reestablish unincorporated communities in eastern Summit County, according to county code. The process helps ensure comprehensive, community-specific plans for land use and addresses how to implement ordinances that pertain to current and future community needs.
Since forming in 2019, the village overlay committee has created several versions of a future land use map to determine how 1,000 acres in the Hoytsville area will be utilized in hopes of mitigating concerns over growth and development in the East Side. Putt said the committee has been considering spatial organization within the planning boundaries and is beginning to look at conceptual density as it creates new iterations of the map.
As the group has been considering various concepts and layouts, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis members created has also been guiding the village plan and the implementation ordinance – which will create a pathway or process that describes how each area is constructed, although the buildout will likely occur over several decades.
Putt said the analysis has evolved into several value statements that are directing not just the land plan, but how the committee will implement the goals for the new town. This includes providing cost-efficient public and/or private infrastructure, various housing opportunities for residents, space for commercial services and ensuring all these developments are placed in appropriate areas.
Tom Clyde, a member of the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission, told elected officials that it’s been a challenge working on the Cedar Crest Village Overlay project because of his opposition to growth in the county. However, he said, he’s excited about the idea because it’s “such a radical departure from the way we’ve seen growth on the East Side.”
“It presents enormous opportunities to get it right,” he said. “It’s a frightening amount of density, it’s a radical change on a very rural, small population community but if it’s done right it’ll have trails, it’ll have parkland – and really the ability to build something that is the equivalent of a community that had grown up organically over 100 years or so.”
County Councilor Doug Clyde echoed the sentiments that no growth would be a good thing, even if it is impractical, but said it’s the first time he’s seen Summit County go through a land planning proposition from the ground up that considers all the resources involved. He also praised landowners for putting aside their personal interests to consider the county as a whole.
“The answer is: this is the way planning should be done,” the County Councilor said. “I will raise my hand and say that in spite of the fact that I am absolutely against any growth in Summit County, period, I think this is a very good land planning process and should be a template for our future.”
Moving forward, Putt said, the next steps are creating an implementation tool, or enabling ordinance, to lay out the design and construction process. He said Planning Department staffers are focused on this stage and have introduced the framework to the land planning group. It acts as a set of rules and intends to provide a framework by listing opportunity points that will be incorporated into the design process when development agreements are negotiated.
“We may have other properties wanting to become part of the Cedar Crest Village Overlay. This tool will help address how we bring properties in. There may be properties that drop out. This will address how we deal with that situation,” Putt said. “It’s how and under what conditions do we achieve these uses at certain intensities and make sure that we have the adequate public infrastructure to support it and do it in a well thought out, phased manner.”
The Summit County Attorney’s Office and the developers are still working on drafting the enabling ordinance before it will be presented to the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission. The county code requires the Planning Department to have a recommendation from the Planning Commission on a land plan, land uses and their intensity, descriptions of infrastructure, and necessary design considerations to the County Council before any action can be taken.
Putt maintained that he wants the public to be aware of what’s going on in the process and is planning several outreach programs to keep them informed. There will be opportunities for public comment in the coming months.