Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Zoning topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Council advances zoning amendments after extended debate over planned-development park and construction-debris facility
Summary
The Tiverton Town Council on June 9 advanced a set of zoning ordinance amendments while also voting to rescind and re-advertise certain edits to the Planned Development Park (PDP) use table after extended debate and public comment about environmental and land-use impacts.
The Tiverton Town Council held a lengthy public hearing and debate on proposed amendments to the town zoning ordinance on June 9, voting both to advertise and advance a package of changes and to rescind specific PDP table edits for re-advertisement and review.
Public comment bookended the discussion. Resident Karen Ephraim of 74 North Christopher Avenue urged the council to reject changes that she said would permit a construction-and-demolition debris processing facility near sensitive watersheds, warning of asbestos, lead and PFAS risks and citing Stafford Pond as a local drinking-water source. Ephraim said the planning board’s and attorney’s reliance on the applicant’s assurances was insufficient and asked the council not to execute a purchase-and-sale agreement with the proposed purchaser until zoning changes and environmental testing were fully addressed.
Council debate ranged across many PDP-specific provisions: definitions (including a new “car vault” use), where PDP columns are placed in the use table, whether family day-care homes should be allowed in the PDP, and whether certain institutional, utility and electric-generation uses should be permitted by right or require special-use review. Several councilors proposed and won amendments shifting some PDP uses from a permitted (P) to not permitted (N) status or vice versa (for example, electric power generating station and electric transmission components were discussed, as were water-tower and substation allowances).
The planning board recommended converting the proposed C&D processing use into a special-use category with objective review criteria and a required public-notice process (notice to abutters within 200 feet), rather than allowing the use “by right.” Councilors and staff said the planning board added objective criteria beyond state requirements; proponents and the applicant had agreed to many of those conditions during the planning-board review.
Because several members raised procedural and content concerns about which line items were actually modified in the advertised table, the council voted to rescind the specific PDP-table changes it had made earlier in the meeting and to re-advertise those PDP-row changes for a future hearing. The town solicitor advised that the safest path where advertised language and the new table’s formatting differed was to re-advertise.
After additional motions and edits, the council also voted to advertise the broader package of zoning amendments (including a new statutory-style definition for construction-and-demolition processing facilities and the planning-board recommended special-use criteria) and to set a future public hearing on those proposed changes.
What’s next: the council has ordered re-advertisement of the PDP-table edits that were rescinded and will return the zoning package to the public hearing schedule; the zoning changes that were advanced will follow the advertising and public-notice requirements for land-use amendments.
Votes at a glance: The council voted to advertise the proposed zoning amendments and separately moved to rescind earlier PDP-table edits pending re-advertisement and legal review. Several PDP-specific changes were temporarily struck or amended by motion during the hearing; those struck changes will be re-noticed.
