Chuck Parsons parts ways with 24-year assignment as P&Z Commissioner

Be careful about the questions you ask and who you go to ask those questions.

That’s how Chuck Parsons’ 24-year history as a Planning & Zoning Commissioner for the city of Brandon began in 1999.

“I approached Dennis Olson and asked him some questions about what P&Z did. I was curious about how – and not just Brandon – churches and schools seem to be on main thoroughfares,” he recalled.

At the time, Mike Schultz was the mayor, and Olson encouraged him to talk with Schultz.

And the rest is history. Twenty-four years of history.

Last week, Parsons made the motion to adjourn his final P&Z meeting in his Commissioner role. His first meeting was May 20, 1999, and since that time, he’s helped to shape this growing city into one of the state’s largest cities.

“I felt good about it. It was fun, but it was also time that I didn’t want to be one of those people that hung on forever,” Parsons said.

One of the more notable changes Parsons saw happen in the P&Z world was how variances are handled.

“Back then, chairperson didn’t vote and we had a city council member on P&Z who voted,” he said.

As only the recommending body to the city council for variances, it was in the early 2000s that the P&Z transitioned into the board of adjustment rather than the city council.

“Their meetings were taking a long time to deal with that. At some point, we, as a board didn’t like that the council person got to vote twice, so we went to the council and said, ‘We’ll take all that on,”’ he said.

Years ago, Parsons says variances were handed out like candy.

Variances, sign ordinances, businesses setting up shop in residential neighborhoods and apartments have long been tagged as “big ticket” items on P&Z agendas. Most, if not all, of their decisions were not just one-meeting and done.

“Like this Neighborhood Business District that we were asked to put together, I still think it should’ve been General Business. It’s sitting on a truck route and is right across from an industrial park, so this is a good compromise. We worked on that for six months, and to sit there and try to compromise with the people that live in the neighborhood was a good exercise to go through,” he said.

Emotions, he said, need to be thrown out of the decision-making process.

“That’s one of the things I learned is you can’t get caught up in emotion … because if you do it for one, now you’ve got to do it for everybody,” he said. 

And typically, the opponent or proponent of any topic of contention, won’t make someone happy.

“If we don’t do one or the other, we probably didn’t do our job,” Parsons said.

With two Thursday meetings each month, Parsons invested many hours of his personal time into P&Z endeavors. 

“I was blessed when I was working because the bank (First National Bank in Sioux Falls) encouraged me to be involved and allowed me time to do that. Our meetings were held twice a month. Sometimes we were done in five minutes and other times we would spend two, three hours. There were times I spent 10, 12 hours in a week researching topics or talking to staff about the loopholes,” he said.

Parsons said there was only a handful of times there was a bank customer that had to deal with something P&Z related.

“A lot of times I would check with the city attorney to make sure I didn’t have a conflict. … If I saw something coming up, I always told my customer that I wasn’t going to vote for this, and everybody was pretty understanding,” he said.

One frustration of serving in this capacity has been when the city council overturned a recommendation by the P&Z or Park boards, for example.

“We would work on things for several months and then pass it on to the city council, and then you have one or two people in the audience that show up and are very vocal about emotional things, and then the council will turn down what those boards recommended. That was very frustrating,” he said. “The difficult thing to explain to people when you have a growing town is just because there was an empty field when you moved there, it may not always be an empty field.”

Over the past few years, Parsons has begun his descent into retirement. He left his position as a board member of the Brandon Valley Area Chamber of Commerce two years ago and will step down from the Brandon Development Foundation in the months to come. He’s trading all of his civic duties in to enjoy life, but says he wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything.

“If anybody wants to get in city government, you learn more as a whole on city council, and with Planning & Zoning you learn the nitty, gritty details of the ordinances and how they impact people and our businesses,” he said.