South DSM News

At its Feb. 21 meeting, the Pella City Council heard from SHYFT senior project architect Kurt Hagge, who has been working with the City’s Community Development Commission and staff to revise and update architectural goals and zoning matters.

The goal was to update, clarify and improve on existing guidelines to encourage more consistency, clearer instructions for development, and also define the city’s Dutch heritage and background.

“What we were trying to do was not necessarily give your current edition of the design guidelines a complete overhaul,” Hagge told the council. “What we were going to do was step it up a notch, make it a more usable document for the Community Development Committee when it comes to reviewing potential projects for a design permit per City process. We also wanted to make sure that we were bringing forward what's already working, tweaking what isn't quite working as well as maybe it needs to be, and also amping up a little more specificity.”

Hagge noted that the changes did not impact any of the City’s application processes or requirements.

“By and large it is the same as it was previously,” he said.

The City did add QR codes and digital footnotes to web pages to make them user friendly and interactive. The process also clearly defined regions for design requirements into separate districts. The historic district includes the central business district and major corridors of travel in the downtown area. Hagge explained that a tier approach is being created with the City's own requirements.

“We wanted to develop an approach that did a couple of things, we wanted to clearly define regions that these guidelines are to be upheld,” he said. “We are calling them districts. And also to more clearly define what that means so that we can allow a little more latitude as we expand away from the central business district as well as the gateway corridors.”

Hagge also discussed several key areas that blend the regions and how they plan to celebrate the contemporary and historic districts. They pertained to Pella’s history and current culture in today’s society. The areas already designed in the city will be grandfathered in and not need to make any changes. The Zoning Board and City Council will also be able to allow exceptions for any guidelines that they see fit.