Jefferson County committee compiles master-plan revisions and will forward questions to planning staff

The Jefferson County Master Plan Review Committee met May 15 and agreed to compile a prioritized list of revisions and questions from its review of the draft master plan and forward that list to county planning staff, including Planning Director Mitch Baer, for written responses before making a formal recommendation to the full county council.

The committee said it had consolidated roughly 13 pages containing 59 suggested revisions, organized as questions, comments and proposed textual revisions. Committee members described the near-term goal as producing a defined, manageable set of items to “send across the street” to planners so staff can explain which changes are necessary, which are already addressed in draft 2, and which may be more appropriate for the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) process.

Why this matters: committee leaders said the committee’s review aims to avoid repetitive, defensive meetings at the Planning & Zoning level and to present a clear set of items that the full council can consider. Committee members said some items have already been resolved in draft 2; others require clarification from planners before the committee finalizes recommendations.

Most of the meeting focused on line-by-line review of the spreadsheet the committee used to track items. The spreadsheet includes columns for whether an item is a revision, a question, or a comment, and a tracking column where committee members marked items “yes” to send to planning or noted them as resolved. Councilwoman Sherlyn Brown asked for an extra copy of the spreadsheet so members could follow as the committee read items aloud.

The committee also agreed to identify items that should be forwarded to later projects tied to this plan — most prominently the UDO rewrite and the action matrix — rather than expecting all language changes to be made in the master plan document itself. Several members emphasized that detailed regulatory standards (such as exact buffer-zone distances or density bonus mechanics) are likely UDO issues rather than master-plan language.

Next steps: committee members said they will complete the consolidated spreadsheet, flag items that remain unresolved, and send the document to Planning Director Mitch Baer for written responses. The committee scheduled a follow-up meeting to refine map-area proposals and to prepare a set of recommendations for the full county council to consider prior to final adoption of the master plan.

Ending: Committee members closed the meeting after agreeing to the timeline for consolidation and follow-up, and urged other members to prepare specific map-boundary proposals for the next session.