Editorials

Editorials

Replace ‘Old Blue’

Recent land use developments — action at Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings — illustrate the importance of adopting new zoning ordinance without delay.

County officials and applicants are devoting a great deal of time to disagreements over the very basics, such as what zone a piece of property lies within. The zoning administrator, in a legal notice, says property is in an agricultrual zone; the planners say no, it’s conservation.

But the existing ordinance is vague. Districts aren’t delineated; designation depends entirely on slope of the property. That determines whether property is agricultural, with a five-acre minimum lot size and one set of uses allowed by right, or conservation, with a minimum lot size of 25 acres and a totally different set of by-right uses.

A landowner or prospective purchaser needs a topographical study to know for sure.

Other problem areas also recently have been obvious. For example, the ordinance requires a rezoning to residential subdivision as prerequisite to subdivision plat approval in many cases. Yet at last meeting, the supervisors held that requirement to be invalid, void and unenforceable. Then two weeks later, the planning commissioners reaffirmed the need to go that “invalid” rezoning route.

And those are just the problems that have surfaced publicly in the last two weeks.

“Old Blue,” as one planning commissioner fondly calls the existing zoning ordinance, has done its work. It’s ready to be put out to pasture..

Word has it that the supervisors are waiting until a county administrator is hired before going ahead with - enactment of the proposed new zoning ordinance, which has been gathering dust on the shelf for more than a year.

Why? An adminsitrator is merely an agent — not a policymaker. No matter who administrator is, he or she will be bound by ordinance provisions. So what difference does it make who that person is? It’s time to move on adoption of a new zoning ordinace.