The City of Bentonville is moving into phase two of a project aimed at guiding the city's growth, with a focus on updating zoning regulations that will shape development for the decades ahead.

The project is part of the Plan Bentonville initiative, which serves as an update to the 2018 Community Plan, the city’s comprehensive planning document. City officials spent a year gathering feedback from residents in phase one of the project to develop the Future Land Use Map, which outlines where and how the city should grow in the coming decades.

Within phase two, the city is now working to align zoning and development rules with the vision outlined in the Future Land Use Map, which was approved in February. The goal is to create complementary tools that will work together to ensure that the desired development is achieved over the coming decades.

“A plan is only so good as its implementation, so this next phase is where we get into talking about our zoning, our development ordinances, and actually making the plan itself actionable,” said Tyler Overstreet, city planning director, at the March 4 Planning Commission meeting.

The Preliminary Plan

Matthew Lambert, a partner at DPZ CoDesign and Susan Henderson, principal of PlaceMakers, have been working with the city on Plan Bentonville. They presented a preliminary plan of zoning updates to planning commissioners at the March 4 meeting.

Lambert discussed the potential implementation of a unified development code, which would combine the city's zoning and land development codes into one comprehensive regulatory document.

Overstreet told The Bentonville Bulletin the unified development code would create clear and consistent standards and more predictable outcomes, both for city staff, the public and the development community. 

“It's much more clear what the rule book is if I'm looking to rezone or redevelop a piece of property in Bentonville,” he added.

The new code will incorporate a visual “transect” concept reflective of the types of places and development intensities that occur in cities across the country. The transect concept begins with natural, open spaces at the lowest level and progresses from rural to suburban, neighborhood and ultimately urban areas. 

This approach helps manage development intensity and compatibility, addressing the contrasts often seen when different zoning districts are directly adjacent to each other under current codes, Overstreet said. By using the transect, transitions between areas become smoother and more gradual, rather than abrupt.

Planning commissioners are currently working with a zoning alignment policy which sets the criteria for rezoning requests in the interim between adoption of the Future Land Use Map and updates to the new zoning codes.

Lambert said they are looking at having a full review of the updates with city staff and planning commissioners in the summer.