Big Picture Planning and Permitting

I've been given twenty minutes to address the joint SB/PC meeting this evening so spent my time waiting for my car to be fixed this morning jotting down notes.

Twenty minutes is not enough time to discuss specific provisions of the proposed zoning regulations in any detail. Instead, I hope to take a step back and discuss the draft zoning regulations as a symptom of a much more serious problem with Norwich town government as a whole -- our planning and permitting process in particular.

These draft zoning regulations are the fruit of a land use governance regime which is fundamentally broken. It represents the cost in dozens upon dozens of volunteer hours devoured by a demonstrably failed approach we nevertheless perpetuate for lack of the imagination, the criticial perspective, and the political will to remedy.

Our current methods have yielded a Town Plan now eleven years without any meaningful updates or review. They've seen us run through nearly two dozen Planning Commission members in the past six years. They've delivered draft zoning regulations -- several times larger than their predecessor regulations in terms of verbiage -- produced by nine (now seven?) volunteers and professional staff working largely on their own. These zoning regulations now face the distinct possibility of rejection by the Selectboard for a number of reasons discussed here and elsewhere.

Who's to blame? Who cares? Our real problem is asset utilization. For years now we've squandered untold hours of volunteer time struggling to run everything planned and permitted through a nine-member Planning Commission. We've allowed our Planning Commission -- in it's many iterations over the past decade -- to become woefully overextended in terms of time and agendas. There's simply no way for a single nine-member commission to do everything we ask of them, let alone do those tasks well. This would be of little moment if it didn't directly impact -- negatively impact -- land owners here in town. The price of poorly conceived regulations; the expense in terms of time, money spent navigating the permitting process, and good will diminished -- plain to see to anyone who sits in on a few DRB hearings -- is unconscionable. All the more so as a viable alternative is explicitly contemplated in recent changes to Vermont's land use laws.

I'd like to talk about that alternative, how it might work here, and how we might go about putting it in place. If we're willing to take a new approach to planning and permitting here in Norwich, I'd recommend rejecting these draft regulations and remanding them for thorough revision consistent with this new approach. If we aren't willing to tackle the deeper issues here, then rejecting and remanding these regulations to the Planning Commission seems to me a cruel, pointless gesture. We might as well accept that these regulations are the best we're going to produce and pity the applicants, their neighbors, and the DRB members who must find there way through them until we get around to revising them another 15 years from now.