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Planning commission begins multi-month cleanup of Unified Development Ordinance and reviews comprehensive plan notes
Summary
The Planning Commission reviewed an Fanning planner’s annotated Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) with roughly 600 notes, divided editing assignments among members, and discussed next steps for formal adoption and county coordination.
The Town of Clayton Planning Commission on Tuesday began a staged rewrite and cleanup of its Unified Development Ordinance and reviewed notes on the town’s Comprehensive Plan, assigning sections for members to edit and clarifying procedural steps for formal adoption.
Commissioners said the planner’s review found more than 600 comments and small inconsistencies — for example, the UDO requires a 5-foot fence around installed swimming pools while the speaker cited the state law as 4 feet — that the commission plans to resolve by technical edits and policy discussions.
The process matters because the UDO governs zoning, development standards and variance outcomes in the town and must be coherent and enforceable. Commissioners said cleaning duplicative or inapplicable language will make the ordinance easier to use and reduce conflicts between local rules and county or state regulations.
The commission moved to manage the work collaboratively using a shared Google Doc and a spreadsheet that marks which items a commissioner can “fix” and which require group discussion. Members divided the annotated list into ranges and took responsibility for specific blocks (for example, 201–300, 301–400, 401–500 and 501–600). One commissioner said she had completed nearly the first 100 comments and will continue. For technical items commissioners are uncertain about, they will flag them for group review.
Commission staff and members clarified the formal process: changes to the UDO require a Planning Commission vote, then the commission will forward recommended changes to the Town Council for its vote. One speaker said, citing state statute, that certain modifications do not require a public hearing; the commission noted it would prefer to complete edits comprehensively before a formal vote but could proceed chapter by chapter if needed.
The commission also discussed related matters: the Comprehensive Plan, adopted concurrently with a county update in 2021, will be cross-checked with the county’s comprehensive plan to avoid conflicting policies at the town boundary. Commission staff (Pete) agreed to attempt to obtain a copy of the county plan for comparison. The group also discussed recent development and market data shared by realtor Shelly Wilson — she reported about three months of housing inventory in town and a median sale price she cited as $321,000 — and said the commission will include data collection in its planning work.
Assignments recorded at the meeting included the Google Doc invitation to members, the division of comment ranges among volunteers, and an expectation to present consolidated edits before taking a formal Commission vote and then forwarding recommendations to the Town Council. The commission did not adopt any UDO amendments at Tuesday’s meeting; it set a goal to address a set of technical edits each month.
