City study: Mesa has looser drive-thru rules than neighbors

Jun. 1—Drive thrus shined during the pandemic by providing social distance and keeping businesses afloat. In the aftermath, food convenience seems to be one pandemic habit that is sticking around, with many traditional sit down brands now adding drive thrus.

For many Mesa residents, drive thrus are getting out of hand. Hearing this input, the city wants developers to get more thoughtful about where drive thrus go and how they're designed.

To help make their case that changes to drive thru regulations are needed, city planners presented information showing that Mesa's zoning rules are more permissive on drive thrus than Chandler, Gilbert and Scottsdale.

In Mesa, drive thrus are allowed in more places than its neighbors, and there are generally fewer requirements for prospective builders of drive thrus.

"Mesa is beyond generous, beyond available for (drive thrus)," City Manager Chris Brady said.

Mesa has been studying the issue of drive thrus since early 2022 at the request of Vice Mayor Francisco Heredia and then-council member Kevin Thompson. Later, the full council gave direction to staff to continue studying the issue and collect stakeholder feedback.

The council was responding to reported increases in the number of drive thrus appearing in commercial centers in Mesa, resident complaints about their proliferation and negative impacts from some of the eateries on neighborhood quality of life.

According to the city study, Mesa's zoning allows drive thrus on about 22% of land in Mesa, which is more than twice as much as the adjacent city with the next-highest figure, Gilbert, which allows drive thrus on 10% of its area.

Chandler and Scottsdale limit drive thrus more drastically than either Mesa or Gilbert, with Chandler allowing drive thrus on 5% of its land and Scottsdale on 4%.

Scottsdale and Chandler are particularly strict; in the limited areas where drive thrus are allowed, a council permit is required in over half the area.

Following the comparison with neighboring communities, planning staff recommended that Mesa follow through on making zoning rule changes on drive thrus despite the blowback from the quick service restaurant industry.

Brady expressed disappointment in the tone that some of the pushback took.

"There are some voices out there in the development community who have taken on these two women in very inappropriate ways and just treated them inappropriately," Brady said, alluding to Planning Director Mary Kopaskie-Brown and Assistant Planning Director Rachel Nettles.

Brady said he stopped the stakeholder engagement process and asked staff to look at how neighboring communities regulated drive thrus, and the city found they they were more restrictive than Mesa.

The city is pressing on with changing its zoning ordinance, but it's again modified its strategy.

Mesa proposes to continue allowing drives thrus in all the zones they are currently allowed, but significantly reduce the areas where drive thrus are allowed by right without a public hearing.

The percentage of land in Mesa where developers would need to apply for a Council User Permit (CUP) for a drive thru would go from 1% to 15% in the current proposal.

This responds to one of Heredia's biggest interests in the drive thru issue, which was increasing the opportunities for city planners and residents to weigh in before new drive thrus go in. He cites situations where constituents have been surprised by new drive thus and wanted a chance to speak up.

In the latest proposal, developers would also have to submit a traffic impact study for new drive thrus.

The city is backing off one of the proposals that developers in public meetings seemed to find particularly onerous, which was absolute limits on the number of drive thrus allowed in commercial centers based on size.

"We think that through our traffic impact study, this would be able to appropriately identify any kind of major traffic concerns that would be generated from possibly an over-concentration of drive thrus being adjacent to one another," Nettles told the council.

Council members' views on how to proceed was unusually mixed. The council eventually directed staff to proceed with public review and a planning and zoning hearing for the new rules, but only after a robust discussion.

Council women Julie Spilsbury and Jenn Duff said they did not want changes that would be burdensome to developers.

"I don't think we're achieving anything by making it harder to put in drive thrus by going through this process," Duff said. "Wouldn't it be easier instead of making it harder for drive thrus is making it easier for sit down restaurants?"

Duff said she'd rather be adding regulation of title loans and check cashing businesses.

Spilsbury said she was dead set against making developers get CUPs for more of the eateries.

"I am not for more regulation at all on this part of it," she said. "I would like to deal with this issue through the design standards."

Other council members saw the move to requiring council permits in a different light.

"What we're doing is giving the public more input," Council woman Alicia Goforth said. "I understand it may be more difficult for developers, but it's a process that allows our constituents to have a voice in this."

Heredia and Council member Scott Somers joined Goforth in expressing support for the council permit requirement for more drive thrus as well as the other proposed updates.

Mayor John Giles broke the tie by throwing his weight behind moving forward with the regulations presented.

"I think the rules that are being proposed here would make us still probably one of the more liberal cities in the area (for drive thrus)," he said.

He supports traffic studies and supports public hearings for new drive thrus, saying that if a specific drive thru is compelling enough to generate a public outcry, "I want to know about it."

Staff said they would not work on refining proposed zoning amendments and creating a draft document for review.