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McKinney staff brief council on drive-through regulations; council asks staff to return with options
Summary
Planning staff reviewed zoning rules for restaurants with drive-throughs, noting recent growth of drive-through sites and existing buffers and criteria; council asked staff to return with options on buffers, effective dates and whether more uses should require specific-use permits.
Jennifer Arnold, the city—s director of planning, gave council an informational update on how McKinney—s Unified Development Code regulates restaurants with drive-throughs and compared McKinney—s rules to nearby cities.
Arnold said the city classifies restaurants by type (for example, dine-in, carry-out, drive-through) and that zoning districts (C1, C2, C3, O2, I1/I2, MTC/downtown) treat drive-throughs differently. She said the 2022 Unified Development Code largely carried over prior use allowances but added or tightened criteria in some places; for example, O2 (office 2) is no longer permitted for drive-through restaurants under the UDC.
Arnold summarized several location- and design-based criteria in McKinney: in the C1 (neighborhood commercial) district a drive-through is allowed only with a specific-use permit (SUP), speaker boxes must be at least 30 feet from adjacent single-family residential, building size is limited to 5,000 square feet in that district, and dumpsters and stacking lanes have locational requirements. In C2 (local commercial), drive-throughs are permitted by right subject to criteria (speaker boxes 20 feet from residential); C3 (regional commercial) is also permitted by right with similar criteria. Arnold said the city enforces landscape buffers, screening, driveway access rules, and—if triggered—traffic impact analyses.
Staff presented a citywide land-use summary drawn from Central Appraisal District codes that showed 85 drive-through restaurants prior to 2023 and 31 added in the last two to three years, for a total of about 110 drive-through restaurants citywide. Arnold said roughly 20% of the recently approved sites clustered around the Hardin/380 area and several at Eldorado and Stonebridge.
Council members raised concerns about drive-through sites that sit close to residences, citing heavy late-night activity at some locations. One council member asked whether the city regulates hours of operation; staff said the city does not currently regulate hours of operation for in-building activity and did not say drive-throughs have a specific hours restriction. Council members suggested options the city could consider: making drive-throughs in certain districts subject to SUPs, adding larger buffers between drive-through facilities and residential zones (one council member suggested a 150-foot buffer), or imposing an effective date so rules would apply only to projects approved after a chosen date (staff said that would avoid retroactively changing existing approvals and trigger less notice).
Arnold said a comprehensive change to straight zoning districts would trigger state-required property-owner notice to existing uses and that most of the city (about 75%) is zoned as Planned Development (PD), which makes a wholesale map re-evaluation time-consuming. She said staff could instead include additional criteria in future PDs or create an effective date so new projects would be subject to new rules without requiring notice to existing approvals. Council asked staff to bring back a set of options outlining scope, impacts and notice implications for council consideration.
No ordinance or zoning change was adopted that night. Staff committed to return with options and additional analysis for council review.
