After the Dallas City Council voted to punt on approving a proposed development code change that could remove some barriers to opening day care facilities — it’s slated to hold a public hearing on the issue again at Wednesday’s meeting.
Dallas city staff briefed the council late last year on the need for more adult and child care facilities.
During the briefing Planning and Urban Design Assistant Director Andreea Udrea told the council that more than half of the city is considered a “child care desert.”
“There are 93,000 children in the city of Dallas and we have capacity….in licensed day cares only for 35,000 children,” Udrea said during the meeting.
Udrea said at the time that the proposed code change would hopefully allow for more care facility operators to set up shop in the city.
“This was a high motivator for us to consider the fact that there is a need in the City of Dallas and anything we can do to remove…the barriers for the operators, zoning being one of them, we want to be sensitive to that,” Udrea said.
The council voted 8 to 7 in favor of delaying approval of the code change. Some council members said the delay was to allow city staff more time to investigate the issue and to allow more time for community input.
“There has been an outpouring of emails from people in residential neighborhoods saying they weren’t aware of this coming down and they would like additional time to consider its implications,” District 14 Council Member Paul Ridley said during the December meeting.
Ridley introduced the motion to delay the conversation until Wednesday’s upcoming meeting.
City staff’s recommendations include combining adult and child care facilities into one land use and removes a special permit requirement for the new use in all residential districts.
Staff’s case report says allowing the use “by right” in these areas “would remove one of the many regulatory barriers and would encourage accessibility to care services for these vulnerable populations in their communities.”
And the report says “church-operated” childcare facilities are already allowed by right — leading to “few [Special Use Permit] applications submitted recently.”
But care facilities are also currently allowed by right in a commercial and industrially zoned areas of the city as well. Staff’s report recommends that operators looking to open a facility in these areas of Dallas should need a Special Use Permit.
However that wasn’t city staff’s first option.
“Staff originally proposed that these uses not be allowed in [commercial] and industrial districts to encourage them to locate in areas with less potential for incompatibility or to rezone areas that might have [commercial] and industrial zoning,” the report said.
But staff said the zoning advisory committee was concerned about the existing facilities in areas that could soon become incompatible under the proposed code change.
That would make these facilities “nonconforming” uses. Basically that means an operation that doesn’t comply with the current Dallas development code — but “was lawfully established under the regulations in force at the beginning of operation and has been in regular use since that time.”
According to the report, at least 18 care facilities are currently operating in areas zoned commercial or industrial. If council passes the proposed change on Wednesday, those facilities would become nonconforming.
“Nonconforming uses are not required [to] stop operating. A nonconforming use may continue and renovate, remodel, or repair a structure housing a nonconforming use if the work does not enlarge the…use,” the report said.
In addition to the special zoning permits in some areas of Dallas, city staff’s report also recommends that parking requirements for adult and childcare facilities be eliminated.
“Not only do minimum parking requirements increase impervious surfaces, but they also contribute to a reduction in outdoor recreational areas, which are much more beneficial to communities than surface parking,” the report said.
The council will hold a public hearing to discuss the proposed amendment at Wednesday’s meeting. Along with combining adult and childcare facilities into one land use, the proposal also eliminates parking requirements and dictates maximum height requirements.
There are currently seven public speakers registered to speak about the issue during the meeting.
Got a tip? Email Nathan Collins at ncollins@kera.org. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nathannotforyou.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gifttoday. Thank you.
