Group Could Address ‘Town, Gown’ Issues

PANEL WOULD INCLUDE UNIVERSITY, CITY, COMMUNITY INPUT

— Neighbors’ complaints about rowdy renters. Students’ concerns about shady landlords. Drivers who fight traffic to and from campus.

University towns across the country, including Fayetteville, share these issues and others.

With record enrollment at the University of Arkansas and more students living off campus, how can a community manage the impact of that growth?

The answer in Fayetteville: Form a committee of university staff, city officials and residents to work through so-called “town and gown” issues.

“We’re going to have to address how we’re all going to work together as the community continues to grow,” Mayor Lioneld Jordan said last week. “It’s a matter of reasonable people sitting down at the table and saying, ‘How can we make this better?’”

Jordan approached university Chancellor David Gearhart earlier this year with the idea of creating a town and gown committee. He said Gearhart was all for the idea. Jordan said the initiative is a response to complaints from residents, mostly in the Sang Valley, Waterman Woods and University Heights neighborhoods north and west of campus. Homeowners there said the city needs a plan for how it will handle development driven by the demand for student housing.

At A Glance

The Committee

University of Arkansas Chancellor David Gearhart and Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan have already identified which departments they would like to represent the university and city on a proposed town and gown committee. Representatives of the community would be named by the City Council’s nominating committee.

City

• Mayor’s Office

• Planning Division

• Code Compliance Division

• Police Department

• Fire Department

• Parking Management Division

• Transportation Division or Utility Services Department

University

• Chancellor’s Office

• Government Relations

• Student Affairs

• Transit and Parking

• Athletics Department

• Facilities Management

• Associated Student Government

Community

• Ward 1 resident

• Ward 2 resident

• Ward 3 resident

• Ward 4 resident

• Fayetteville business owner or representative of the Fayetteville development community

• University student living in the city

• City Council member

Source: City Of Fayetteville

Their concerns were discussed recently at City Council meetings regarding a proposed apartment complex across from Leverett Elementary School. Concerns also arose as city leaders debated a change to city code allowing up to five roommates to live together in certain new developments.

Aldermen will consider Jordan’s plan for the committee. If they approve it, the group will be made up of 21 people. It will include seven university representatives, seven city employees, and seven residents. The board will meet monthly, and all meetings will be open to the public, officials said.

Danny Pugh, vice provost for student affairs and dean of students at the university, said university growth plans will likely be high on the agenda, but the panel can address any topics.

Enrollment grew from 17,269 students in fall 2004 to 23,199 last year — more than 34 percent.

Pugh said renovation to Hotz and Founders halls will add 600 beds on campus by fall 2013. The university relies on private developments to meet a large portion of its housing needs.

“We can meet all of our freshmen enrollment growth, but we can’t meet the need for second-, third- and fourth-year students that want to reside on campus,” he said. “I think the market is responding to what’s out there and where the growth is. And that’s a good thing.”

He mentioned plans for apartment complexes at Cleveland Street and Hall Avenue, off Lafayette Street, on the site of the former Washington County Livestock Auction and on a hill south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

University officials are developing a housing plan to identify needs. Pugh said results of the plan will be available when the committee meets this fall.

Several City Council members and residents in recent weeks have said a committee needs to look at creating a university overlay district. An overlay district is a regulatory tool imposing limits on land in a certain area beyond what city zoning districts require.

Overlay districts have been created in Fayetteville for historic neighborhoods, wooded hillsides and the Interstate 540 corridor. The university, as a state agency, doesn’t have to follow local zoning requirements on its property.

Donna Daniels, who lives in the Sang Valley neighborhood, said Wednesday she thought a university overlay district was needed off campus to “protect the neighborhoods around the university so that they will continue to be neighborhoods and won’t turn into student living areas.”

According to an April analysis by Karen Minkel, former director of internal consulting for the city, a number of university towns have implemented overlay districts, including College Station, Texas; Gainesville, Fla.; Manhattan, Kan.; Stillwater, Okla.; and Las Cruces, N.M.

In Manhattan, home of Kansas State University, the districts identified areas that should remain single-family neighborhoods and areas with potential for multifamily development, according to Minkel’s report.

Daniels said people serving on Fayetteville’s committee must be committed to researching how other communities address issues that come with a university.

“This shouldn’t be a hurry-up-and-get-it-done process,” she said. “This should be a process that we look at very carefully. It needs to be deliberative.”

Julie McQuade, Fayetteville’s community outreach coordinator, and Sylvia Scott, director of the university’s Off Campus Connections program, both said there’s a history of university and city officials working together to address university growth and the neighborhood pressures that come with it.

Scott’s program has a website and newsletter helping students find off-campus living and offers tips about being a good neighbor. She said one of her employees will begin making presentations about living off campus to students in freshman dorms next year.

“We’ve got a long way to go, I think, but we’ve been working steadily,” Scott said.

McQuade said incoming students received a packet with a welcome letter from the mayor and police chief, an overview of city ordinances and the Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission’s “Insider’s Guide to Northwest Arkansas” during freshman orientation last week.

“In the past, that communication hasn’t always been there,” McQuade said.

Pugh noted successful attempts to work on joint university-city projects in the past such as lighted crosswalks added on Garland Avenue. He also mentioned a joint effort by university officials and Fayetteville police to curb alcohol and drug abuse in recent years.

“This group doesn’t need to micromanage what’s been working well already,” Pugh said. “If we clog the system up, that wouldn’t be a good thing.”

City Council members are set to consider a resolution to establish the committee at their July 3 meeting. The council’s nominating committee would then take applications from those who want to be involved and select seven people sometime in the third quarter of this year, McQuade said.

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