Ukiah Planning Commission reviews Airport Industrial Park plan development; staff notes urgent-care application

Ukiah City Planning Commission members spent the bulk of their Sept. 24 meeting on a staff-led review of the Airport Industrial Park planned development and related redevelopment constraints, and were briefed on a new urgent-care application for 1240 Airport Park Boulevard.

The training, presented by Jesse Davis, Chief Planning Manager, traced the Airport Industrial Park (AIP) from its annexation and early development through later amendments and infrastructure improvements, and highlighted how the park’s planned development (PD) regulations differ from the city’s other zoning districts. "I really wanted to try to keep this higher level to just allow for an overview of the Airport Industrial Park, its opportunities, and also potentially some new ways of looking at it," Davis said.

The discussion matters because the AIP contains large, underused parcels, significant privately held deed restrictions, and transportation and noise constraints that affect what the city can permit there. The staff briefing raised the interaction of those constraints with the state Surplus Land Act, recent changes to airport land-use compatibility, and the loss of redevelopment authority funding statewide in 2012—factors that limit the city’s ability to subsidize or directly assemble development.

Davis summarized AIP history and infrastructure limits: the park’s initial build-out accelerated in the early 1990s (including a Walmart in 1993), and subsequent traffic mitigation and signalization projects were required as large-format…