The Urban County Council will hold a special public hearing to determine an ND-1 District designation for The Old Colony neighborhood, located off of Versailles Road in southwest Fayette County, at 6 p.m. March 5 in the council chambers.
Perry Bozarth, the president of the community’s neighborhood association, said it has been a four-year process to get to this stage.
Different from an H-1 overlay, the ND-1 option allows a neighborhood to select from 15 specific design standards that can be customized to a particular neighborhood’s needs.
“This is nothing compared to H-1,” he said. “We aren’t doing anything that says you can’t put in certain types of windows or certain types of doors, or those sort of things.”
Bozarth said the neighborhood was interested in implementing three criteria for their community: 1. No front yard fencing, or front yard retaining walls, 2. No more than one accessory structure that exceeds 12 foot by 15 foot (such as a detached storage building), and 3. No house could be torn down, and no new additions to a home could be made that would make the structure 25 percent of the footprint of the lot it sits on.
Bozarth said the neighborhood was developed in 1948 and that many of the homes are on lots close to an acre in size or larger. He said that no house in the neighborhood currently exceeds an 18 percent footprint of their lot.
“So that still allows residents to continue to add on to their houses and still not exceed the standards, but still keep in in the character and eclectic nature of the neighborhood,” he said.
Bozarth said part of the long process for obtaining an ND-1 overlay for the includes soliciting support among the neighbors. He said the neighborhood association sent out a petition to the neighborhood’s 71 households, or which 42 returned said they were in favor of the ND-1 designation and 18 were against; 11 did not respond