Cheyenne staff asks council to OK city-initiated rezones, flags Business Park, aging PUDs and RV-park rules

Seth Lloyd, a planner with the City of Cheyenne Planning and Development Department, told the City Council at a work session that staff would like authorization to pursue several city-initiated rezones, most urgently to expand a recently adopted Business Park (BP) district to contiguous areas where minimum-area rules currently block single-parcel requests.

Lloyd said the city can initiate zone changes under the Unified Development Code but that state law gives property owners inside a rezoned area a protest right: if 20% of owners in the area protest a city-initiated rezoning, the ordinance would require eight council votes to pass rather than the usual six. "The authority to zone is found in Wyoming state statute," Lloyd said. "...there is a protest provision, which would allow owners within an area to be rezoned to protest."

The issue matters, Lloyd and council members said, because the BP district was written to apply to large swaths of land rather than single parcels. That minimum-area requirement means a vacant parcel surrounded by established users cannot secure BP zoning on its own: "We didn't want it applying to just one parcel," Lloyd said. He added the biggest practical difference in BP zoning is landscaping requirements and that the code now allows on-site caretakers on many property types.

Nut graf: If the council agrees, staff would bring forward targeted city-initiated rezones to make the BP district usable where appropriate and to clean up other legacy issues in the code — misapplied Mixed-Use Boulevard (MUB) vs. Community Business (CB) zoning, decades-old PUDs whose written rules no longer match…