COM 0045.025 2002-2004 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Honorable Leningrad Elarionoff, Chair and Members of the Committee on Planning COUNTY COUNCIL Page 7 December 15, 2003 enacted, the mapping and ratification process would probably take a couple of years. This is too long for the county to delay action on the General Plan to wait to see what happens with IAL's on the state level. 4. Length of the General Plan Some councilmembers have commented about the length of the draft General Plan. It is not much longer than the current General Plan, but perhaps this is not a sufficient justification. It would be possible to significantly reduce the length of the General Plan by separating out the material that really needs to be part of the Plan and enacted by ordinance, from text that is primarily descriptive. Only part of the General Plan text must have the force and effect of law: primarily the goals, policies, standards, and courses of action, the LUPAG maps, facilities, and roadways maps, the lists of areas of natural beauty and protected historic sites, and the general policy materials in the Land Use and Plan Implementation sections. The district profiles, tables of information about housing units, historical materials about population and visitor arrivals, while useful, do not have to be enacted by ordinance. The current 1989 General Plan is basically organized in a way that separates out the goals, policies, standards, and courses of action, with the remaining material in a "Support Document", but both parts were enacted by ordinance and printed together. Reorganized this way, the General Plan could probably be reduced to about half of its present size. The other descriptive material is important, and could be a supplement to the General Plan, but printed in a separate binder. There is no other way to substantially reduce the size of the General Plan without completely rewriting it. The reorganization of the General Plan would have to be carefully done so that the important policies remained part of the adopted plan. Some of the "descriptive" material is important to provide a context for the rest of the plan.