At their first meeting of 2025, Traverse City planning commissioners set several goals for the coming year – including revisited proposed changes to allow for more city housing density, updating short-term rental rules, finishing a long-discussed riparian buffer ordinance, and engaging the public more in planning efforts.

Planning commissioners completed a major lift in 2024 by completing and adopting the city’s new master plan and mobility action plan. The master plan includes an “action plan” that outlines concrete goals and tasks for city departments to tackle over the next five years. Thirteen of those come under the purview of the planning commission. In September, planning commissioners ranked priorities for items they wished to tackle first, including exploring caps and other changes to short-term rental rules, updating rules and boundaries for riparian buffer zones, and tackling one or more zoning updates to help attract more affordable housing.

Commissioners this week agreed to establish those three priorities as goals for 2025. With some of those items already in motion, the board could start to move quickly on them in the coming months. For example, planning commissioners in December started reviewing potential short-term rental changes, including eliminating a distinction between “low intensity” and “high intensity” tourist homes and merging those into one category, requiring licensing or other stricter regulations for hospitality houses in hospital districts (where illegal vacation rentals appear to be operating), exploring an escalating fee system for violations, and considering a citywide cap or different caps in commercial districts for vacation rentals.

The board will discuss those possible changes in more depth at their January 22 study session. City Planning Director Shawn Winter said staff could then prepare an updated draft ordinance to bring back for review. It could take the board multiple meetings to review and approve changes, but if they reach consensus, those proposed updates would then be sent to the city commission for review and approval.

Planning commissioners also hope to revisit some housing density changes they supported in 2023 that city commissioners declined to take up. While the city commission approved many density updates proposed by the planning commission, they never voted on a proposed provision that would allow triplexes, quadplexes, and ADUs with a duplex in the R-2 zoning district. Winter called it a “dangling item” planning commissioners could bring back for consideration. As one example of how the increased density could help, Winter noted a property owner in Traverse Heights has five adjacent R-2 lots he wants to use for community housing. The current rules limit him to building duplexes, but Winter said the owner would build quadplexes if allowed, creating more in-town housing. Since the board already created proposed language for the ordinance change previously, reviving that discussion could be fairly straightforward, Winter said.

Deputy Planning Director/Sustainability Coordinator Leslie Sickterman said a riparian buffer committee – consisting of planning and city commission representatives, city residents, and staff – is nearing completion on a proposed draft ordinance. The city defines riparian lands as “properties with frontage on an inland lake, river, stream, or Great Lakes.” A riparian buffer is “the naturalized area upland of the water’s edge, ordinary high water mark (OHWM) a lake, or edge of the streambank or riverbank.” Introducing rules that will regulate activity and development along sensitive areas like Kids Creek, Grand Traverse Bay, the Boardman/Ottaway River (pictured), and Boardman Lake has been a city goal for several years. The draft riparian buffer ordinance is expected to come to the planning commission for consideration in the near future, Sickterman said.

While the above list of 2025 goals is expected to be the primary focus of the planning commission in the coming months, staff noted other projects could come up that interrupt or add to that list – such as a major development that’s time-consuming to review, or direction from the city commission that redirects staff’s attention to other issues. The planning commission could also tackle other low-hanging fruit in 2025, such as exploring rules that would require parking areas for new commercial and multi-family developments to be EV-ready.

Chair Debbie Hershey said that if there was time at the end of the year, she also wanted to start discussing a longer-term goal from the master plan: establishing building design standards for commercial developments. “It's being talked about a lot out there (in the community),” she said. Discussion could also begin on some topics that could carry over into future years. For instance, Winter noted the region’s metropolitan planning organization (MPO) recently allocated approximately $1 million to the reconstruction of Fourteenth Street, with that funding potentially slated for 2028. A complete rebuild of the corridor is estimated to cost $10-$20 million, so the city’s ability to tackle a full reconstruction – versus simply resurfacing the road – depends on securing additional funding. But if a reconstruct does occur, planning commissioners could develop new zoning standards for Fourteenth Street ahead of time that could help spur redevelopment in conjunction with the road work.

“We learned from Eighth Street that when the city makes an investment in itself, then the private investment follows,” Winter said.

Finally, Hershey said she also wants the planning commission to set a communications goal for 2025 “to give the public a way to communicate with us, and for us to communicate back to them.” That could “take a variety of forms,” Hershey said, such as creating public “office hours” during which residents could meet with planning commissioners or staff, or creating a mechanism for the public to submit questions and planning commissioners to set aside time at meetings to address those. Planning commissioners are expected to brainstorm further on communications options at a future meeting.