Gettysburg Planning Commission Chair Charles Strauss said the borough’s newly adopted zoning ordinance represents a long-overdue effort to protect residential neighborhoods, simplify decades of amendments, and provide clearer guidance for future development.
“One idea was to protect the residential districts,” Strauss said. “We did some work to remove uses in the R-1 and the R-2 that would be more commercial than residential.”
Strauss pointed to late-stage changes as evidence that the commission responded to concerns raised during public review. “One at the 11th hour was removing vape shops,” he said, noting the use was eliminated after residents asked for stronger protections.
According to Strauss, preserving neighborhood character was a consistent theme throughout the rewrite. “First of all, it’s protecting residential spaces,” he said. “People from Residential-2 came to us and said, ‘We also want to protect our residential neighborhoods.’”
At the same time, the ordinance introduces a more graduated approach to neighborhood commercial zoning. The commission added a fourth neighborhood commercial district, NC-4, intended to allow mixed-use development while limiting the scale and intensity of commercial activity.
“The idea of that is that we would allow for mixed use in a stepped-down way,” Strauss said. “There’s a graduating level of how much commercial you can do versus residential, and I think it’ll allow flexibility.”
Strauss cited Carlisle Street as an example of how the new structure is intended to work. “If those Victorian homes stay residential, great,” he said. “But if somebody wanted to open some kind of shop on the first floor, that would be allowed.”
A major focus of the rewrite was removing overlapping zoning overlays that had accumulated over the past 15 years. “There were so many amendments over the years — I’m talking 15 years of amendments — there were some things that were inconsistent,” Strauss said.
The Streetscape and Elm Street overlays were eliminated, with their standards folded directly into district regulations. “When somebody wants to build in a certain district, they just go to that district,” Strauss said. “They don’t have to cross-reference other parts of the ordinance.”
“Hopefully this will cut down on requests for variances,” he said, adding that the ordinance is now “pretty clear rather than having to go through variance.”
While Strauss expressed broad satisfaction with the final product, he was candid about his opposition to last-minute changes to building height limits. “I’m pleased with everything but the building height,” he said. “That is significant to me.”
He said he was disappointed that height provisions were added after the commission had made its recommendation. “I don’t like that it was added in after we made our recommendation without a chance for it to come back to us,” Strauss said.
Despite disagreements, Strauss emphasized that the process involved extensive public engagement. “There was definitely plenty of public input,” he said. “The community knows what’s happened.”
Looking back, Strauss said the central achievements of the ordinance are clarity and consistency. “I would say clarification and consistency in the ordinance, the effort to preserve residential parcels in the R-1 and R-2, and then a graduated set of neighborhood commercial with four distinct districts seem to be positive.”