When out-of-town developers called Joe Gooden, Springfield’s building and zoning administrator for the last eight years, they’d usually ask for the city’s landscaping code. But up until two years ago, Gooden says, Springfield didn’t require builders to plant trees or to landscape their projects.
“I used to have to tell them we didn’t have any rules,” Gooden says. “They were shocked.”
Then on August 19, 2001, the City Council under then-mayor Karen Hasara passed the so-called “Scenic Springfield” laws. Developers were suddenly required to plant more trees, hide garbage bins, and erect buffers between their projects and their residential neighbors.
Regulations for signs and outside lighting were implemented. Blinking signs-on-wheels were forbidden. Zoning changes promised to eliminate scattershot planning. Previously the city’s haphazard approach had resulted in small retail strip malls mingling with industrial properties. These developments–along with an effort to enhance downtown Springfield–signaled that the city had finally grasped the benefits of urban planning. At the very least, it was trying to catch up to other central Illinois cities–such as Peoria, Champaign, and Bloomington–that were years ahead when it came to “smart growth” practices.
Yet smart growth wouldn’t come easily in Springfield.
This week the City Council reneged on a part of Scenic Springfield. One new zoning law required that “adult” businesses could not be located within 1,000 feet of schools, residential neighborhoods, churches, and other public buildings. The ordinance was to be applied retroactively and seemed specifically aimed at Déjà Vu, the strip club on Stevenson Drive. The Hasara administration wanted the club to move to a less visible location. Déjà Vu sued. The city prepared for a fight.
But when Tim Davlin took office in May, he let it be known he’d rather settle the lawsuit than move the club–the city faced too many legal battles already. There were rumors of behind-the-scenes negotiations, and last Tuesday the City Council allowed Déjà Vu to stay put.
The zoning law didn’t change, says Gooden. Déjà Vu was merely granted grandfather status. How can you have progress in Springfield without throwing in a variance or two?
Overall Scenic Springfield has been slowly making a positive impression. But some still say it goes too far. Of course, many others say it doesn’t go far enough.
Landscaping
The Super Wal-Mart on North Dirksen stands as a testament to city planning before Scenic Springfield. The store was one of the last big developments approved prior to the 2001 reforms. Its parking lot is huge, bare, and ugly–nothing but pavement. Unless you count the garden plants for sale outside, there’s hardly any landscaping. It’s a common setting for many Springfield establishments.
Then, in contrast, there’s the new Lowe’s, just to the south of the Super Wal-Mart. While it’s still under construction, its parking lot is already accented by numerous trees. Lowe’s is just one of the 85 new developments since 2001 that are in compliance with Scenic Springfield, says Gooden. Seventy of these plans were for new construction; 15 were remodeling projects.
Landscaping serves three primary purposes in urban design. The first is, obviously, to gussy up a neighborhood. Plants, flowers, trees, and quality architecture tend to make for a nice looking city. Anyone who has been to Portland, Oregon, or Madison, Wisconsin, can attest to this fact. There’s also an environmental advantage to landscaping, according to smartgrowth.org, a Web site sponsored by a Washington, D.C., nonprofit to offer advice for city planners. As prairies, farmland, and other natural areas are replaced with buildings, parking lots, and streets, “runoff, which prior to development is filtered and captured by the natural landscape, is trapped above impervious surfaces and accumulates and runs off into streams, lakes, and estuaries, picking up pollutants along the way.” Landscaped developments help prevent such runoff by acting as pollution filters. Green space also improves air quality. Lastly, by enhancing the quality of life, urban landscaping can encourage further development.
Springfield’s landscaping ordinance is based on Peoria’s, a point-based system that allows developers a little bit of leeway as long as what they put on the ground adds up right. The type of project determines how many landscaping points must be obtained. Planting larger, shadier trees or preserving land earn more points than relying on shrubs and bushes. In case something underground, such as a utility line, prohibits the placement of a tree, Gooden’s department is allowed to accept alternative proposals.
That’s what happened with the Dodge car lot on West Wabash, says Gooden. Under the landscaping ordinance, Dodge was required to plant trees along Wabash. But a gas line ran parallel to the street and the dealers were allowed to avoid planting there. “They would have preferred not to have trees there anyway,” says Gooden. “They are selling cars. It would be hard to see them through trees.”
The point system, Gooden says, earned Peoria some urban design awards. But it’s not every urban planner’s favorite strategy. The team of architects and urban planners known as R/UDAT who visited Springfield early last year reviewed the new landscaping ordinance and wrote about it in its final report.
“In general, the ordinance is a positive tool that will help the community achieve its goals to create a pleasant . . . environment,” the team wrote. “One area of concern, however, was discovered in the ordinance related to the ‘point’ system used to determine compliance.” The freedom the point system allows, they argued, means that “continuity in design will be difficult at best.”
There are those who couldn’t care less about beauty or continuity, or at least the way the city government defines them. WMAY 970 AM afternoon talk show host Jim Leach has spent many hours on the air debating with listeners about the city’s beautification plans. While Leach says a lot of people called in to speak in favor of Scenic Springfield, the debate was often one-sided, with little consideration given to the “concerns of business.”
“I do think people here feel strongly that their property is their property,” he says. “I think most people act responsibly.”
He could point to the Culver’s restaurant just to the west of the Super Wal-Mart on Dirksen. Though it was built prior to Scenic Springfield, it has much more landscaping than the giant retailer.
Leach is not opposed to some regulations, but he’s concerned that any plan promising to make the city more attractive is bound to be too subjective and infringe on the rights of property owners.
“Some people say trees in a parking lot is beautiful; some say it’s anything but,” says Leach. “My idea of a beautiful parking lot is an empty space at Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon.”
Signage
Rick Dunbar is owner of Dunbar Portable Signs in Springfield. He says his business has been cut in half since the city banned portable signs with replaceable lettering and flashing arrows.
He claims the sign ordinance has done nothing but confuse people. For one, he says, there are so many municipalities within Springfield where these laws don’t apply–such as in Jerome, Southern View, and Grandview–that it appears as if nothing’s improved when driving through the city. “It’s confusing to people,” he says. “There’s so many holes in the donut.”
Dunbar also has suspicions that the city isn’t going after all violations. “At first I didn’t follow up on the ordinances. But I started driving around town after the city took down my signs. Between my home and the grocery I can count 20 violations. I can spend half a day pointing out all the violations.”
The city was planning to take a one-day-at-a-time approach to enforcing its new sign ordinance, says Gooden. As a start, it was only going to enforce violations people reported.
“Then some gentleman drove around town and gave us a list of about 200 violations,” says Gooden. The city had no choice but to go after them. Within the last two years Gooden estimates his department has cited about 500 violations. “We’ve addressed banners, flags, signs on light posts, moving signs,” says Gooden. “It’s been quite a bit of work.”
It’s going to take quite a bit more work to reduce ugly signage. And Scenic Springfield is partly to blame. A couple of years before it was passed into law, a moratorium on billboards was enacted by the City Council. The moratorium was meant to buy time for the city to develop a new policy. But there was a loophole, says Gooden. During the window of time between the introduction of the billboard moratorium and its passage, at least two sign companies–Mid-America Signs and Imperial/Key–applied for 43 permits for new billboards. Absent a law regulating billboards, Gooden says, the city had to approve the applications. As far as he knows, all 43 permits led to new signs, some of which haven’t been leased since and now merely advertise that the billboard is for rent.
Scenic Springfield intends to reduce the number of billboards. For every new sign a billboard company puts up, it has to take down four. This may sound tough, but it will take years to recover from the moratorium gaffe, which, ironically, led to one of the largest signage booms in city history.
Trash
Oddly one of the city’s worst environmental problems wasn’t addressed in Scenic Springfield. Civic organizations, such as the Springfield Project and Unity for Our Community, have strongly recommended improving the way the city hauls garbage. Proposals have been made to rethink the city’s privatized system of garbage collection and bill residents through City Water, Light and Power so that no property owner can evade paying for garbage disposal.
But apart from being an issue already debated by the City Council and mayoral candidates during the last elections, our waste-hauling system has not been reformed, according to Polly Poskin, who sits on the trash reform committee of Unity for Our Community and has served as a president and vice president of the Harvard Park Neighborhood Association. She’s currently the executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault in Springfield.
The city has helped clean up residential areas by working with neighborhood associations, Poskin says. Associations take a day or two out of the year to collect garbage in alleys, parks, empty lots, and yards, using city trucks to carry the junk away.
“We get excellent responses from the city,” says Poskin. “You couldn’t ask for better help.” But the neighborhood has to do all the work, she says.
“I still think their ‘improvements’ with the large-item pickups is not effective. And we still don’t have a comprehensive solid waste program.” No city agency has been charged with making sure people get their trash collected on a regular basis. “We can’t get agreement on mandatory billing requirements so that all households have pick-ups.”
In her neighborhood, Poskin continues to see problems with trash–abandoned tires and large items in alleys, bags of yard waste littering front yards. She also says the way garbage is picked up is confusing and inconsistent, with some haulers requiring property owners to bring their cans to the street and others requiring them to bring their cans to the alleys. Each company also issues stickers for cans to avoid picking up extra garbage. Such a system, Poskin says, encourages everyone to avoid responsibility. “People continue to pile up trash behind their house or alley which they don’t know how to get rid of, can’t pay to get rid of, or assume a waste hauler will pick up. In most other cities, it’s the expectation that it is the government’s responsibility for the city not be mired in garbage.”
The city has a person whose job is to educate the public on trash hauling and recycling, but according to Ernie Slottag, Springfield’s director of communications, there’s no one person at City Hall whose job is to oversee the actual disposal of garbage.
Poskin says she hopes trash hauling becomes the top priority for the proposed Public Infrastructure department. Ignoring the issue, she says, would be shameful. But she’s also fearful that waste hauling will be lost in a bigger bureaucracy.
“It would be indicative of a kind of systemic breakdown,” she says. “The whole
infrastructure is what makes a city a viable place. If you don’t have snow removal
and garbage pick-up, you’re not going to have a city people want to live in.”
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2003.
