Speaking as a denizen of Core Norman, I think the City Council needs to get its act together about impervious surfaces, specifically paved driveways and parking areas around our homes. Are they a Good Thing that should be required or a threat to the watershed that should be discouraged? Well-meaning Norman residents need to know.
I am thinking of my across-the-alley neighbors, for example. I only know them to wave to and exchange a few brief comments when we're out working in our respective back yards, but they seem like nice people who only want to be good neighbors and do the right thing.
Like the rest of the neighborhood, their house predates the concept of the multi-car family. When his stepchildren started to drive, my neighbor sacrificed part of his back yard and spent many long, sweaty hours creating a parking area for them off the alley. He enclosed it on three sides with wooden fencing, brought in a load of gravel and made a tidy little parking alcove.
I considered it a far more elegant solution than the two that usually prevail: (1) having the kids park on the street or (2) doing the driveway shuffle. It also seemed safer to have young drivers backing out into the alley than into the street where there is more traffic.
But, he told me recently, someone complained to the City and they made him get rid of the gravel. He poured concrete, and the last time I took out the trash I saw they had gone the whole nine yards and landscaped it with flowers planted around the fence, adding a touch of class to our otherwise unremarkable alley.
Barely was this project completed when the City Council met to discuss the stormwater and greenway master plans to protect our water supply. The proposal for addressing the water quality and drainage issues involves charging a "stormwater utility" fee based on the amount of impervious area on a site -- such as my neighbor's newly paved parking space, which wouldn't have been so impervious if the City had let him go with his original plan.
A lot of the roadblocks standing in the way of "smart growth" and "going green" in communities around the country seem to involve ordinances enacted by previous city and town councils responding to demands to protect people's property values by making their neighbors stop doing something viewed as tacky: keeping a shop in their home, raising chickens in their yard, hanging their underwear out on a clothesline for all the world to see. Now we're all dealing with the fallout from these decisions -- including the stormwater runoff from acres of parking lots made necessary by zoning ordinances that prevent people from working and shopping in the neighborhoods where they live.
In recent years in Core Norman we've seen the "proactive code enforcement" crackdown on people parking in their yards, including the attempt to outlaw gravel driveways because they make it difficult to tell where the driveway ends and the yard begins. We've seen plenty of people upgrade their parking areas, like the folks across the alley with their alcove and the people around the corner with their new circular driveway. At least in my neighborhood, people have been shelling out some pretty good money on the parking situation in an effort to be good neighbors and do the right thing.
But if the "right thing" for creating an acceptable place to park in your yard is the wrong thing for the watershed, the City Council needs to get its priorities straight.
Columns
City needs to decide about impervious surfaces
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