My understanding of the zoning change process is TMAPC makes a recommendation to the Council, then the council approves or disapproves the change and has final say on the matter.
At least that is what I learned with the whole proposed Turkey Mountain development. Is this different?
This is different because it was a land use map change, not a zoning change.
The land was already "zoned" as a PUD back in the 70's. (Nope, they don't expire!) Because the PUD was in place, the development was only considered a "minor amendment" to the PUD, which does not require/involve the City Council. (Major amendments to a PUD DO require council approval. Because this didn't represent a massive change to what was allowed in the old PUD, this was considered a minor amendment.)
What the Council voted on was a change to the "Land Use" map which is supposed to represent the vision of the Comp Plan. The land use map gets updated typically concurrently with any zoning changes that impact it.
The land use map shows a broad category of how we envision the land should be developed: downtown, parks and open space, main street, regional center, town center, neighborhood center, etc. It's supposed to be a guide to the Planning Commission to show the overall vision of the city's long-range planning & development. (I can't say that they particularly respect it. They're very comfortable "spot zoning" / making one-off changes and doing whatever a developer wants, regardless of the comp plan. But staff recommendations do consider this.) </end rant>
The zoning map, on the other hand, shows how each particular parcel is zoned: single-family residential, multi-family residential, office high/low, commercial shopping, PUD, etc.
So in this case, our Planning Commission failed to require the developer to provide something better than the average crappy suburban development. (They also failed to stand up for INCOG staff recommendations, which were ignored.) And they rubber stamped the minor amendment to the 1970-whatever PUD.
This left the City Council with the administrative step of updating the Land Use map to reflect that decision. They initially voted no on it, just out of consternation with how the entire process went down (city selling park land for development without involving the council, etc). However, it was sort of pointless to vote no on this, b/c it wouldn't change the outcome. So after they made their point, they went ahead and voted to update the land use map.