Planning Board Holds First Hearing On Recodification Ahead Of Town Meeting
Falmouth Planning Board’s multi-year recodification project is finally being prepped for Town Meeting, having had its first of a series of public hearings on Tuesday, September 28.
Town Planner Thomas Bott gave a presentation before the board and was joined by project consultants Bob Ritchie and Robert P. Mitchell via Zoom.
Mr. Bott said the process of recodifying the town’s zoning bylaws began under the administration of the previous town planner, Brian Currie, a few years ago, and has been split into phases. The goal for phase one is to reorganize the current bylaw so that it reflects current state law and is better organized and easier to use, but without making changes to the bylaws themselves.
“This is our bylaw, and it’s been growing for years,” said chairwoman Charlotte Harris. “It’s been recodified at least once over the years, maybe more than that because as it grows it gets disorganized. It’s been straightened out a few times. Over the last four years, we’ve been working to straighten it out again.”
This first phase of recodification mainly focuses on the procedural details: cleaning up language, organizing tables and lists in an intuitive way, clarifying vagueness.
“Some sections of the bylaw have been deleted; some sections have been reworked; there have been some modest language changes to it,” Mr. Bott said. “With those changes, it’s like doing a renovation on an old house. You get into things and you pull out the wall and you go, ‘Oh, that’s not what I was expecting to see there.’ We’re going to have to bring a bit more than just putty and paint to this structure.”
While working through phase one of recodification, consultants on the project began steadily building a list of things to double back on during phase two.
“In the conversations that we had with builders [and] legal counsel, we generated a 64-page matrix,” Mr. Bott said. “[We] went through those changes in the bylaw, some of which were incorporated, some of which were rejected, some of which were identified as more of a phase two change to the bylaw.”
Phase two will consist of making actual changes to some of the bylaws to make them more workable and aligned with the town’s current practices and Long Range Comprehensive Plan. Ms. Harris said that the board will be seeking input on phase two in the same way it is doing with phase one: consulting with town staff, residents and anyone who regularly comes before the board and interacts with the bylaws—engineers, attorneys, developers and builders.
Mr. Mitchell summarized the work that’s been done so far for phase one and highlighted the reduction in the volume of the bylaws—from 47 articles to 14—as a main feat of the project. In doing this, they were able to group similar concepts together more seamlessly by including them all under an umbrella article, rather than having various articles on similar topics scattered throughout the document.
While condensing and clarifying the available bylaw information has been the focus of the recodification project, a secondary goal has also emerged: building a system that will last.
“The goal here is to start building a new bylaw framework and organizational structure that can last a long time,” Mr. Mitchell said. “And that will begin the process of making it easier to deal with some of the more substantive topics that await further action and further discussion by the board, staff, and citizens of Falmouth.”
The board continued the public hearing on recodification until its next meeting on October 12.