Growth FAQ - General

How does the City balance the property rights of landowners who want to build with the desire of adjacent residential homeowners who want to preserve their neighborhoods?

The Growth Management Department staff works for all City stakeholders. That includes neighbors, businesses, and everyone else. We work to balance the priorities of all stakeholder groups. Sometimes those priorities compete with each other. That process of balancing competing priorities occurs in cities throughout the country. Let me offer an example of how we do that in Tallahassee. On the business side of things, we recognize that the economy is important. Permitting should be rigorous and protect public health and safety, but it should also not stand in the way of smart development. To that end, we’re constantly working to find ways to issue permits faster and more efficiently. For example, we have a money back guarantee that residential permits will be fully reviewed in 7 days. We did that without compromising any environmental, planning, or safety standards. On the other hand, we also are focused on neighborhood interests. In recent years, we updated our Zoning Code with a range of new standards to improve compatibility between existing neighborhoods and adjacent new commercial uses. We’ve also doubled the area that receives a mailed notice of new development, from a 500-foot radius to a 1,000-foot radius. Finally, we also improved the signs used on new development sites to notify the public of the proposed project. They are now bigger and more stable, and have been redesigned to make them much easier to read from a distance.