Monroe County planning staff preview housing‑inventory prototype; commissioners ask for standardized spreadsheet first

Planning staff presented a prototype housing‑inventory dashboard to the Monroe County Plan Commission during an administrative meeting, saying the tool links a survey to a map and produces a spreadsheet that can be exported for analysis.

Staff member Jackie said the dashboard uses color coding to show projects at different stages: “orange dots being that they’ve received a site plan development or secondary plat approval. The green dots mean that they actually are at the stage of building permits, and then the purple dots are just preliminary approvals such as rezones or primary plat approvals.” She said the prototype currently displays addresses, plat lot counts, minimum lot sizes and case file numbers, and that the dataset was intentionally small for initial testing.

Commissioners and staff framed the presentation as an early prototype and repeatedly urged that the first deliverable be a standardized spreadsheet rather than a public map. Planning staff agreed to e‑mail a spreadsheet and the survey to commissioners for review and to publish a refined version on the county’s CDO (County Development Ordinance) website once the data has been validated.

Why it matters: commissioners said a clean, comparable unit of measure is essential because the county and city collect residential data differently (for example, some city records are by bedroom while county approvals are by unit). During the discussion planning staff and survey/GIS staff identified key comparability issues: units per acre (Westgate was given as 9.8 units per acre versus 0.4 units per acre for a typical minor subdivision), minimum lot sizes (2.5 acres used in several sliding‑scale examples) and the distinction between approved units and built units reflected in building permits.

Supporting details and next steps: staff noted the source data is a consortium of county systems (assessor, auditor, building permits) and hosted map services (Esri/ArcGIS Online). Commissioners recommended that the spreadsheet include columns for zoning, whether a rezone was required, unit counts, plat and building‑permit numbers and a simple year built/built vs. approved flag. Planning staff said they can add a building‑permit layer and that the surveyor’s office and GIS division can help publish a live atlas if the dataset is cleaned and a central repository is established.

Staff emphasized data quality and privacy considerations and said vacancy rates are proprietary and not reliably available from public records. The planning staff called the prototype a starting point; commissioners asked for a short list of sample parcels (including some with different remaining years on existing 25‑year reservations) to illustrate how the inventory will report status and constraints.