Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re: Energy/heating/design issues

[RAYGASSER (RAYGASSER]

Roger Diggle & Jeffrey Hobson hit on an omportant point - work with the
town planners/building dept closely. A few good reasons: 1) you probably can't
sneak anything by them anyway, and 2) they're a lot more likely to cut some
slack if they feel like they've been part of the process instead of just
an approving body.

Ithaca's a pretty forward-looking community, and we seem to have  a lot of
support on the town board & planning board. Most of what we want to do is
incorporated in the new town master plan, but has not yet filtered down to
the planning board policy/law level, so we had to apply either for myriad
zoning variances (which would have taken a long time and needed more action),
or apply for a SLUD (special land use designation) which is pretty much
a decree by the town board, with details worked out by the planning board 
after a few town meetings to hear from concerned citizens. We just get our
whole CoHo community to flood the building, so nobody with a different (and
clearly WRONG!!!) point of view has a snowball's chance of getting heard!
(actually, the community seems to be behind us as well, so life's simpler).

Anyhoo, the planning board & building folks seem willing to work with us
on almost all issues, provided we can give them some reasonable, logical
reasons to think that what we want to do  can work, and that while things
may not be strictly within the letter of the rules, they are certainly well
within the spirit.

Ray Gasser, EcoVillage at Ithaca
raygasser [at] delphi.com