Mayor-president pushes 'replacement' of Lafayette's development rules

Mayor-President Josh Guillory made it clear Friday what his goal is for a special committee he's assembled to discuss rules governing development in Lafayette.

“Replacement. That’s what we’re here for,” Guillory said at the start of the first public meeting of his committee to replace Lafayette’s Unified Development Code. “It’s not the ‘UDC Fix It’ or the ‘UDC Amend It Again and Again.’ It’s replacement.”

Guillory’s 40-person, volunteer Unified Development Code Replacement Committee is tasked with overhauling the local regulations that govern development across the city of Lafayette and the unincorporated parts of the parish. The code sets regulations for commercial parking requirements, residential drainage specifications and countless other aspects of development.

The Unified Development Code became a political punching bag for Guillory during his campaign last fall. His opponent, no-party candidate Carlee Alm-LaBar, previously served as Lafayette Consolidated Government’s community development director and was instrumental in implementing the code in 2015.

With Friday’s meeting, Guillory took the first public step toward his campaign promise to “repeal and replace the UDC” to encourage more development in Lafayette.

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Minimum parking requirements in the city of Lafayette were an early target for criticism at the meeting, with Lafayette Economic Development Authority CEO Gregg Gothreaux suggesting that Lafayette should lose its regulations that set a minimum number of parking spots for residential and commercial developments.

“We’ve got to rethink this whole thing. We don’t need to be in the parking business,” Gothreaux said.

“Even if somebody is ridiculous enough to put up an office with one spot, and they go out of business and the building’s worthless, how many times is that really going to happen? Let’s just get out of the parking business except for (setting) maximums,” he said.

Other criticisms centered around a restriction on inline drainage setups for residential developments. Acadian Home Builders Association CEO Adrienne Fontenot called on Guillory to remove them from the code.

Another criticism focused on a general lack of guidance for redeveloping existing structures in downtown Lafayette, which Downtown Development Authority CEO Anita Begnaud pointed to as one of the biggest oversights in Lafayette’s development code.

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Ultimately, the committee is expected to produce either a new set of development regulations or a comprehensive list of changes to the current code that would amount to a significant overhaul of its development restrictions.

Still, replacement isn’t on the committee’s agenda just yet, and some members questioned whether a fundamentally different development code is a step in the right direction.

Committee member Russell Trahan, owner of Trahan Architecture and Planning, said he felt the current code needs major changes, but added that replacing the entire 370-page document would mean a whole new set of regulations for developers and code enforcers to learn.

“Having a brand new document show up for the code reviewers and the architects that have to work with that code and the engineers, that’s where we were with the beginning of the UDC. All of a sudden we had so much new stuff,” Trahan said.

“We’re more comfortable with this today, although there are major problems. But we are more comfortable and can navigate it better. Change is the big issue, so a complete change is a little bit difficult in my mind.”

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