Friday, September 21 -- After four days of listening to Taos citizens and trying out ideas, the PlaceMakers team is ready to present drafts of the town’s new Land Use Master Plan and Development Code. The big event: Tonight at 6:30pm in Don Fernando Hall.

“We’ve had a busy week,” said Susan Henderson, principal in the PlaceMakers consulting group charged with producing Taos’ new zoning map and code. “But it’s been a fun week.

“We’ve had a chance to meet lots of people from many of the neighborhoods and farms, and we’ve learned a lot about what’s important to them,” said Henderson. “When citizens come to the presentation tonight, they’ll see how we’re incorporating what they’ve told us, not only in meetings this week but in the Vision 2020 Plan the community produced nearly a decade ago.”

One issue that’s on everybody’s mind, despite it being beyond the mandate of zoning, is affordability. While the SmartCode can’t make housing more affordable by itself, it can support broader community policies aimed at delivering more options for families at all levels of income. So the PlaceMakers team is stressing how the mapping and coding deliverables can be companion pieces to economic development and affordable living programs.

On Thursday, the more formal meetings were over and the PlaceMakers’ team of planners and designers settled in for an intensive period of work to prepare for tonight’s show-and-tell. Drop-in visitors, including citizens who’ve attended multiple meetings during the week, checked in. A group from the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, which is contracted with the city for trails and other work projects, stopped by to be briefed by Taos long-range planner Matthew Foster. And at dinnertime there was a special treat, a sampling of local cuisine prepared by a family from Taos Pueblo. When they arrived at the design studio, it was the only time in the day when everybody abandoned drawing boards and laptops.

For most of the day, planners delved more deeply into the challenges of customizing the SmartCode for a town as diverse as Taos. Here’s just one example: After hearing from citizens how highly they valued family agricultural traditions, the team created special sub-categories of the SmartCode zone usually assigned to agricultural lands. In the Taos SmartCode, there will be a T-2-T Zone for family gardens and live-stock in town and a T-2-C for the same uses in the county.

“If we used the kind of standards for T-2 agriculture in other parts of the country,” said PlaceMakers planner Jennifer Hurley, “families wouldn’t be able to follow the tradition of subdividing larger lots. And if we followed the standards for T-3, which is a suburban zone in most other places, residents wouldn’t be able to have cows, chickens, or horses. It’s another example of how you have to make the code match the town instead of the other way around.”