The Metro Council Zoning Committee tonight, at the request of Councilman John Delgado, will consider revising the city’s Major Street Plan to reduce the width of the right of way, or setback, on a busy stretch of Perkins Road between Glasgow Avenue and Congress Street.
The change, if approved by the council, will have implications for the development of Rouzan, Tommy Spinosa’s traditional neighborhood development in Southdowns. Spinosa’s development was controversial because neighbors were concerned it would overburden the area’s aging infrastructure and create more traffic. Others, however, favored the development.
The city-parish Planning Commission staff is supporting the revision on its agenda today. Earlier this year, the agency recommended against the change on the grounds that the city’s Major Street Plan calls for a certain amount of right of way for future road improvements.
At Delgado’s request, however, the Planning Commission staff further reviewed the issue with the city-parish Department of Transportation and Drainage and determined that reducing the width of the setback from 125 feet to 100 feet still leaves the city-parish enough space to make any needed road improvements in the future, according to Assistant Planning Director Ryan Holcomb.
The city’s Major Street Plan is a more-than 60-year-old document that lays out the city’s street grid and also anticipates future road development. It calls for Perkins Road to be five lanes wide and have a 125-foot right of way. In the years since the document was written, however, Perkins Road has expanded to five lanes, and Delgado has argued there isn’t any reason why the right of way should remain at 125 feet.
The issue is important because it has implications for the commercial portion of Rouzan, called the Village Center, which comprises three buildings and includes a 220,000-square-foot apartment building and a 30,000-square-foot Alamo Drafthouse movie theater. Though the buildings are set back far enough from Perkins Road under the current set of plans to comply with the Major Street Plan, should the requirements in the plan be relaxed Spinosa would be allowed to move his buildings closer to the street.
“It will also allow a wider sidewalk to be constructed,” Holcomb says.
Delgado says making the change is the right thing to do from a planning perspective. He also says he would like to revisit the city’s Major Street Plan to look at other outmoded and inconsistent requirements in the document. He says he expects the council to approve tonight’s measure.
“If it wasn’t tied to Rouzan there wouldn’t even be an issue,” he says. “No one would even notice.”
—Stephanie Riegel
