 Valparaiso, Indiana is a City of nearly 30,000 people, located in northwestern Indiana. The City’s existing land development regulations were a collection of ordinances that included many positive and progressive elements, but were not well coordinated. The heart of the City’s zoning ordinance was substantially unchanged since the 1960s. The City retained Kendig Keast Collaborative to comprehensively redraft its land development regulations into a single Unified Development Ordinance (“UDO”), in order to: better organize and integrate the various provisions of the code; provide new approaches to preserving and protecting community character; increase flexibility for developers; improve natural resource protection standards; and provide standards for the improvement of existing homes in established neighborhoods so that variances (which are primarily decided on “practical difficulties” to the homeowner and not on impacts to the neighborhood) were not required for common requests (e.g., decks and small additions).
 Kendig Keast Collaborative worked with City staff and a representative steering committee to identify those parts of the existing regulations that were working well, and to develop and refine other programs to meet City planning objectives. The nuance of Indiana law with respect to the authority of the City and its various boards and commissions was considered during the development of the proposed UDO, and several novel approaches to achieve the City’s substantive and procedural objectives were recommended for review by the City Attorney.
The City’s UDO is published in ZoningPlus, which provides an easy-to-navigate web-based interface, along with relevant graphics, calculators, and visualization tools. During the final review stages of the new code, ZoningPlus allowed the draft regulations to be made widely available, with a comment tool that allowed City residents to submit their comments on individual sections of the code.
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