Megan Pillow | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | April 27, 2008

When Tim Brown came to Mooresville to work as the town’s new planning director in 1996, his first stop was lunch with the region’s other planning directors.

That “spirit of cooperation,” said Brown, was a driving force in how he hoped to plan for Mooresville’s future.

The region, he said, was on the verge of “blistering growth” and had recently been rocked by the 1995 Peirce Report on the Charlotte region. The report, a four-part series by Neil Peirce and Curtis Johnson, compared Charlotte to Atlanta and stressed the need for regional services and public involvement in planning streets and other infrastructure.

One of the most pressing ideas coming from planning and development circles, said Brown, was “the need to look at the form development was taking in the region.”

Although Mooresville was “fortunate” to have “forward-thinking electeds who saw the value in keeping its tools and resources current,” the town was still using a handful of planning tools that needed to be updated, he said.

Brown said the town’s zoning ordinance had last been revised in 1986, when Mooresville was a town of about 9,000 people. Planning streets was still based on the common idea of feeding smaller streets into arterial streets that could handle heavier traffic, and businesses, dining and shopping were only in specific areas of town.

Those tools and methods could not fully anticipate the growth that was heading Mooresville’s way. The zoning ordinance, Brown said, needed to be updated, as did the town’s method for handling new developments.

Roadways were becoming more and more congested, so transportation plans needed to be developed, as did an idea for how to make the town more pedestrian-friendly.

Brown said town officials made a stab at significant change in 1998 with a new land-use plan that color-coded different areas of town and their uses in an attempt to anticipate areas of future growth. But questions remained about whether or not the town was well-equipped to deal with what was coming.

“Turning some of the corners in the challenges we faced was a process,” he said.

One of the biggest questions, said Brown, was one on the lips not just of the town staff, but also the public: how to keep Mooresville a great place to live.

The answer to that question would be determined by what tools the town chose to develop to deal with growth, said Brown, but would also raise another important question: “What will our legacy be?” 

Comments

Can’t we just live with what we have?  Why the urge to become a big city?  We have restaurants, shopping, housing, do we need more?  Everyone seems to be obsessed with an excessive lifestyle.  Maybe less is more.  If you want to live in a thriving metropolis, move to Charlotte.
As a Statesville native, I would like to continue living in a small town.  We have the convenience of Hickory, Winston, and Charlotte within 40 minutes.  We can drive to culture, shopping and fine dining in less than one hour.  Leave this town alone!

Posted by Carla Hinson on 04.29.2008 at 05:16 am

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