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UPDATE: PROPOSED SMART GROWTH OVERHAUL MUDDIES WATERS FOR MONDAY VOTE
Friday, September 30th, 2011 -- 10:34 am
Posted by Riley Hebert-News Director
Just days before the Clark County Board was set to take up the third and final reading of the comprehensive plan, a new piece of legislation aims to completely revamp the state’s controversial Smart Growth legislation.
On Thursday, Representatives Mary Williams (R-Medford) and Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) announced plans to introduce a bill that would reform current law.
According to a press release, their bill would allow local units of government to opt out of Smart Growth and remove the mandatory compliance date that requires local governments to have a plan in place.
The press release says the bill would ensure access to all economic development programs for communities, regardless of the existence of a comprehensive plan.
Passed as part of the budget in 1999 and reformed in 2009, Wisconsin’s comprehensive planning statute requires municipalities’ official mapping, local subdivision regulations and zoning be “consistent” with their comprehensive plan.
Zoning Administrator Weighs In
Clark County’s Planning and Zoning administrator says he didn’t hear about this legislation until Friday morning.
Steve Kunze says he wishes the legislation would have come years ago, before so much time and so many resources were expended drafting the local plan.
"We've spent a lot of committee and department and County Board time on this," Kunze points out, "if this could have been resolved in the past, it wouldn't be an issue now. We would have moved on."
The state law was the impetus for the county to launch into the planning process. If they didn’t feel they needed the plan, they wouldn’t have spent their time working on it, Kunze states.
"We're doing a revision of our county zoning ordinance and we're required to do a revision of our county shoreland zoning ordinance. If that (planning) requirement wasn't there, my feeling is...the comp plan issue probably would not have come up," he says.
Kunze cautions there are no guarantees it will pass the legislature and be signed by the governor.
And, while he says it will probably not have a “positive” impact on the plan’s chances of passing at Monday’s County Board meeting, he won’t venture a prediction on if the board will approve the final reading, scrap the plan or table it.
Phone calls placed to Rep. Suder's office Friday morning were not returned in time for this report.
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