I have a fear of commitment - or perhaps I should say commitments. I didn't use to. But the more time that passes before we begin a thorough review of out City's zoning ordinances, the bigger the fear looms. Fear of how complicated the commitments become, fear of how they will be interpreted in the future and fear of missing some detail that can somehow make the outcome a complete 180 from what was envisioned.

Paranoid? Maybe, but let me tell you a story about a pig, a stripper and a gold chain.

Once upon a time there was a new subdivision proposed to be filled with spacious, upper end and very handsome homes in a beautiful little community. When this subdivision was being rezoned, the community saw an opportunity for a neighborhood that could rise above the minimum zoning and the developer seemed to share this vision (at least to some extent.) So great care and scrutiny went into carefully crafted commitments so that the end result could be a model for future developments. Granted, there was still a healthy degree of skepticism, given the community’s past experiences and disappointments with new development. But the people thought every "t" was crossed and every "i" was dotted, from the pitch of the roofs to the width of the streets and everyone had high hopes. People would come there looking for an idyllic life where yards were beautifully landscaped, streets were swept clean and yard lights cast a mellow glow on beveled windows.

Although things were slow to start, when the first homes began to appear there was great delight - it seemed that the homes were going to be even nicer than anyone had originally envisioned. All the time and effort was finally paying off. Homebuyers were invited to enter through a stately entrance and were treated to a
landscape of graceful homes and well manicured lawns. It seemed all was going according to plan and homes continued to pop up, with the construction carefully
monitored by the community, the developer and the new homeowners to make sure the commitments were followed to the letter. Many months went by and people were happy and the kingdom thrived. And then the pig came...

One day, next to one of the new homes resplendent with elaborate and carefully designed landscaping valued at thousands of dollars, a pig moved in. Granted, it was a nice pig, very well groomed, affectionate toward its owner and it didn’t play loud music while speeding through the quiet streets or have the audacity to put up mailbox that didn‘t match the others in the neighborhood. But still is was a pig - a very big pig, weighing in at almost 200 pounds. Of course, it is hard to put a leash on a 200 pound pig, so a chain link fence went up and suddenly, in the midst of the quiet, upper end subdivision, there was a pig pen.

As you can imagine, this raised a few eyebrows among the homeowners who had worked so hard to make certain their neighborhood complied with the long and complicated list of zoning commitments. So they called the zoning inspector - SURELY this had to be a violation of the commitments. The answer was, no, this was not a farm animal, it was a domesticated pet and since there were no restrictions against domestic pets, the pig could stay.

But wait! What about the utilitarian chain link fence that surely did not suit the character of the expensively landscaped home lots. Again, the answer was no - there was no zoning violation. The fence was a legal height and, since most of the zoning efforts had been focused on the homes and landscaping in the front yards in order to create a pleasing streetscape, no one anticipated difficulty with what might happen in the back yard and no one thought about what a fence might look like.

Rumor had it that the pig had, at one time in its shadowy past, been part of an act in a bar of ill repute where the show included exotic dancing. Wasn’t there some moral reason why the pig could not join the community? But no, the pig had seen the error of his ways, paid his debt to society and led a model life in his new home.

Next, the neighbors called in the Health Department. Even though pigs had once been enormously abundant in this formerly agricultural community, this was now the suburbs. And this was a PIG - a mud-wallowing, scrap eating PIG. And there are reasons why people through the years have used the word "pigpen" to equate with filth and chaos. But the owner kept the pig in good health, cleaned up the refuse in the yard and took the pig inside at night. No health code was being violated.

Not willing to give up the fight, the neighbors tried once last ditch effort to send the pig packing. SURELY, there was some reason why the enormously expensive gold chain the pig sported around its portly neck was an affront to the best interests of society. Oddly enough, there is no local, state or federal law that prohibits foolishly accessorizing your swine with precious jewels.

Finally, neighbors had to accept that the large pig was a

legal resident of the neighborhood - lock, stock, and pigpen.

The point of the story? It does not matter how careful you are - when it comes to zoning commitments, there will always be a pig waiting around the corner that no one expects. That doesn’t mean we should give up - it does mean that there are no guarantees that vision will become reality. So we have to learn not to repeat mistakes once they are identified, be as clear as we can and build on the lessons we learn about development. We have to learn to sort out the important issues from the mediocre so that those commitments we agree upon with a developer will have a true impact on the long term quality of life in the community. At the end of the day, does it really matter that there are 574 commitments if 523 deal with the color of the mailbox? But the longer our lists of commitments become to try and fill in the gaps in our ordinances, the stronger the message becomes that the ordinance may no longer be providing the maximum benefit to the community.

Our efforts to ensure quality develop that enhances our communities cannot stop with acting on individual petitions. We must press the City to advance the time table to review and amend the zoning ordinance so that the combined experience of planners, developers and residents can be put to use to set a high standard for the future development of Marion County. We need to allow for reasonable flexibility while maintaining basic principles and holding to standards that will meet the test of time. We need to make this a priority so that we can stop being afraid of commitments and all they imply.

Because sometimes, you get the pig and sometimes the pig gets you.