Recognizing the overwhelming impact of excessive surface lot parking, Maumee approved parking maximums and eliminated minimums. The city also approved extensive zero setback requirements and over four miles of new bike paths, and continually moves to reduce legal non-conforming structures, which include inefficient surface lots through development agreements aimed at incrementally reducing parking and impermeable surfaces. We legislated reducing individual parking space square footage, including a mandatory reduction in parking lot drive lanes widths. The mayor and city council are also committed to increasing the city's tree canopy by over 30% over the next 10 years, which includes extensive private parking lot and street tree canopy.
Our community approved a "complete streets" resolution years ago, but never followed those concepts. However, since 2020, Maumee has taken a myriad of steps to make our community much more walkable: road dieting of our major streets is perhaps our most remarkable endeavor. Every construction project our community pursues first and foremost considers Strong Towns principles. Examples: with the help of the Ohio Department of Transportation, we reduced lanes widths, installed curbs, and are currently constructing a four-mile intermodal pathway and installing 1,200 street trees along US 24 through our city. The city reduced State Route 25 through our uptown from four lanes to three, including adding on-street parallel parking on both sides of the street, further protecting pedestrians and accommodating businesses. Construction of additional 217 on-street spaces reduces dependence on paved surface lots.
Maumee holistically plans for infrastructure and budget decisions. We continually evaluate existing infrastructure maintenance costs and the long-term impacts of extending new infrastructure. Each decision is weighed by considering the following questions: does it promote infrastructure efficiency, does it move toward a better vehicle–pedestrian balance, promote walkability overall, and enhance the human-scale environment?
Transparency in the budgeting and accounting processes are achieved through a new accounting and finance software module. This affords public review of annual budgets, 10-year capital improvement plans, and monthly financial reports in clear and simple terms, which offers more options for forecasting and transparency. This is similar to a public dashboard.
Over the past several years, our community adopted a number of measures to provide not only a higher level of infrastructure efficiency, but also much higher density requirements in housing, including, once again, embracing workforce housing. While the city still has minimum lot sizes in some areas, the city council has approved the city administration's ability to make variance concessions through development agreements. We are moving faster toward truly "form-based" codes and higher mixed uses. Additionally, we are requiring multi-story residential buildings utilizing 12- to 14-foot ceiling heights to accommodate future first-floor mixed-use commercial conversion. We are currently in the process of making zoning ordinance changes to accommodate accessory dwelling units (ADUs).
Education first! The city has purchased over 200 copies of Strong Towns, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Walkable Cities, and Walkable City Rules, and gives them away to business owners and residents. We are getting significant buy-in to Strong Towns principles. Our city administrator speaks often regarding infrastructure efficiency and further enforces the expiration of "legally non-conforming" structures, which include parking lots on almost every project. Our goal is to reduce at least 10% of our asphalt and concrete pavement over the next 10 years. Many say we are landlocked. We kindly point out that we are not vertically locked. Vertical infill is a principle we follow in Maumee.
Unfortunately, many residents do not fully understand why these changes are being undertaken in our community. That is not to say we lack supporters. The more we educate on Strong Towns constructs, the more buy-in we experience. The mayor, city council, city administrator, as well as many others in our community continually explain the concepts we now embrace. Every speech or presentation we give within our community mentions our willingness to embrace concepts that were once absent in our daily dialogue with others. Explaining, in detail, concepts such as induced demand, "infrastructure efficiency," and "vertical edge friction" and how these and other concepts afford further understanding for small groups increase the spread of this message.
For 38 years as a city manager, I have been involved with a plethora of infrastructure and development projects. I served 22.5 years as the village manager of Dundee, Michigan, and while there, I met a young engineer by the name of Paul Adjaba with the Michigan Department of Transportation, and he unknowingly introduced me to many of these concepts while working on a Cabela's project in our community, helping road diet a four-lane state highway to three lanes. Fast-forward to Jackson, Michigan, where I served as city manager for over eight years and again Paul Adjaba, now District Traffic Engineer, aided in road dieting an entire downtown loop, starting a renaissance in the downtown. While I served Jackson, he was the director of MDOT and helped me reach a better vehicle–pedestrian balance. In Maumee, I continue embracing once unrecognized Strong Towns principles. Not stopping now.
