RE: Recommended Changes to Elbert County Regs to affirm the advisory Master Plan
In response to the SVV case regarding the authority of the county Master Plan,
see: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2008/02/13/spring-valley-vistas-case-docs/ ,
and see: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2008/02/03/is-master-plan-regulation-or-advisory/ ,
the BOCC affirmed the advisory nature of the county Master Plan by directing all Master Plan language in county Zoning Regulations, Subdivision Regulations, and 1041 Regulations, to be changed or removed to reflect this fact.
Well done Commissioners! Thank you for doing the right thing by rescuing the county from Judge Holmes’ judicial activism. His attempt to direct county regulatory policy from the bench was wrong headed and the BOCC was absolutely correct to nullify it.
Moreover, the ambiguity of the Master Plan question has been a festering thorn in Elbert County’s side for years. This BOCC of John Metli, Suzie Graeff and Hope Goetz, has done the county a great service by resolving it, and by resolving it the correct way.
* 9/25/08 update *
Comments to Elbert County Planning Commission
Commissioners engaged in some dialog with me after I read this statement. I was able to reinforce the point about the inconsistency between general planning directives and regulatory law, and how the former due to its ambiguity should never become law. One commissioner brought up the new master planning efforts and I was able to make the point about how the transportation master plan contains language that is quite extraneous to transportation. This commissioner expressed favor for the master plan and said that the planning commissioners could make it regulatory if they chose. I think he over reached on that comment. In an effort to understand his favorable disposition toward planning in general, I asked him how the existing master plan had benefited Elbert County since its inception in 1996. I believe the answer was, “a lot of arguments.” The point was made.
After my bit, the planning commission heard a subdivision application. The application entailed a novel use of an existing category of subdivision regulations applied to a new set of circumstances, with the intent of cutting down on bureaucratic red tape.
Many provisions of this regulation set were held to not apply to this particular application, and many provisions of the application were repeated verbosely numerous (5 or 6) times in different sections of the application. After hearing the entire thing, my guess is that if you took out the redundancies and the inapplicable provisions of the application, a 20 page document could have been narrowed down to one or two pages, and a tremendous amount of time and expense could have been avoided by the Elbert County Community and Development Services Department, the property representative, the planning commissioners, and those attending this meeting. So much for one-size-fits-all governmental solutions. It’s a real tragedy to see so much brain power wasted on mind-numbing redundancy and inapplicable details.
