The City-Parish Council will vote Tuesday on final approval of the Unified Development Code, a rewrite and streamlining of the planning and zoning codes that govern development in Lafayette and unincorporated Lafayette Parish. As the name suggests, the UDC also unifies separate zoning codes that exist within the city and in the unincorporated part of the parish.
The UDC has been in the works for more than a year, a companion to PlanLafayette, the comprehensive plan already adopted by the council following months of public forums and input from a committee of citizens. The committee that developed the UDC included land developers, builders and real estate agents as well as city planners.
Last week the council heard from Randall O’Toole, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and well-known opponent of urban planning and mass transit. O’Toole insisted the UDC would fail and have “serious unintended consequences.”
O’Toole was brought to Lafayette at the behest of the local tea party group and invited to speak before the council at the invitation of the tea party emissary to the council, Councilman William Theriot. If we’re handicapping its likelihood for passage we would call it 6-3 odds in favor.