Earlier this year, Sussex County Council created a Land Use Reform Working Group to address concerns expressed by residents regarding rapid growth throughout the county. According to Todd Lawson, County Administrator, the group has met many times and hope to come to council with some recommendations.
“I feel like our progress and our pace has been adequate and now I’m hopeful that we are going to land the plane, if you will, in the next couple of meetings,” Lawson said. “We’ve had terrific participation from our membership and that is positive because these are volunteers spending countless hours of their time coming in and prepping for these meetings.”
Lawson explained that the working group planned to finalize recommendations and present them to council during the third quarter. Currently, the group is reviewing all suggestions and ideas in an effort to get them on paper with details and goals. Lawson stated that the group wanted to be sure that council was well aware of any ordinance changes that addressed growth, so they were able to make good decisions.
“We don’t just want to put something out there like “increase density in certain areas of the county,” because that give you no direction,” Lawson said. “That is just an example because it is one of the things we are focusing on, density and where it makes sense. To address a question asked during public comment, yes, any ordinance change will need to have a public hearing, and we will be able to get input from constituents.”
Councilwoman Jane Gruenebaum thanked the group for their time in putting together what was a difficult and time-consuming task.
“I also want to commend them because we did not want to see this be a task force that just sort of went on and on,” Gruenebaum said. “I also appreciate the fact that the recommendations are going to come to us in a form that are specific enough that we can take action. I also want to make a clarifying statement that the task force is advisory to us, they are not the ones to make the decisions. We will be the ones to make the decisions. I just want to be clear about that.”
Gruenebaum did express concerns that while the task force worked on new ordinances, there may be a number of applications suddenly coming in to get ahead of changes.
“One of the things we have discussed is something called a “pending ordinance doctrine” which I know some of the municipalities in the county use, but has never been used at the county level,” Lawson said. “What that doctrine indicates is that, at a certain point, when the county is getting ready to do something, that it would be inequitable for someone to be able to file something quickly to get it across the counter ahead of a proposed ordinance.”
Lawson continued, using the example of a no billboards ordinance and someone coming in to file for a billboard before the ordinance took effect, there could be language in place that would prevent that from happening.
“We’ve made procedural changes within the planning and zoning department that require information we need before a major subdivision can even be brought to us,” Jamie Whitehouse, Planning and Zoning Director, said. “It has to be submitted to PLUS. There has to be a forestry assessment. There has to be supporting documentation through resource buffer management. These are things you cannot craft over a weekend and decide on Friday you want to submit on Monday. They take weeks and months. The larger the development, the more complex those are aligned with the need for professional resources.”
Whitehouse admitted that, in the past, there had been cases when a developer put in an application that had not been through the processes and obtained the necessary information before it was presented to the public or council, but there were now processes in place to stop that.
“What I would suggest is that there be very specific recommendations, that there are multiple ones,” Whitehouse said. “I would argue against the one, big, beautiful bill in this case in that you should have very specific requests. You want specific ordinances because the more defined they are, when it comes to the public hearing process, the easier it is in the discussion without getting bogged down in other issues.”
Gruenebaum pointed out that the issue could be the developers who were close to submitting an application but may not get them done prior to a new ordinance going into place.
“If someone has been working on an application for eight to ten months, I would anticipate the ordinances we discussed by the work group would have little impact as they had already acquired the property and there is no definition when an ordinance would take effect,” Whitehouse said. “I will point out that any of you can introduce an ordinance at any time, although it has been our policy to kind of discuss it here first to see if there is support for it. So, by simply filing for an ordinance, you would not prevent someone from filing plans as the ordinance has not taken effect.”
Whitehouse and Lawson cautioned against the pending doctrine ordinance simply because someone may already have a development in the pipeline and that they would have the ability to offer a variance to anyone whose development was close to submission that may not meet new ordinance requirements.
“I think everyone gets your intent that there’s certain changes you want to make,” Lawson said. “You would like to get them done quickly and so the outcome is not just making the change, but you want the outcome to change.”
