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Benton County plans multi‑phase development code overhaul and to publish code on Municode
Summary
County staff outlined a three‑phase plan to update the Benton County Development Code to reflect recent state legislative changes, remove internal inconsistencies and improve readability; the county plans to publish its full code on the Municode (CivicPlus) platform with an estimated early Q2 rollout.
Benton County community development staff told the planning commission Jan. 2 that the county will pursue a three‑phase update to its development code and adopt Municode as the searchable online platform for the county’s regulations.
Darren Nichols, community development director, said the code update has three parts: (1) catch up on state legislative consistency updates; (2) update provisions that will follow policy changes from the comprehensive-plan work; and (3) reformat and improve legibility of the code. "I think it's a 3 phase kind of effort," Nichols said.
Shannon Bush, interim deputy director in community development, described steps already underway to make the county’s entire code—previously published as separate PDF chapters—searchable online. She said the county has finalized the county’s side of a contract with CivicPlus to use the Municode platform and that CivicPlus estimates about a three‑month turnaround from contract execution to a live searchable code. "What Municode will allow us to do is... type in the word fence, and it will highlight for you anytime the word fence comes up," Bush said, explaining the platform’s basic search and document‑linking features.
Staff emphasized that Municode will host not just development-code chapters (chapters 49–100) but all Benton County ordinances and county code, so references and supporting documents (for example, agendas and minutes tied to ordinances) will be searchable alongside the text. Nichols told commissioners that countywide adoption simplifies access: "Now as Shannon described... we actually have all of Benton County's regulations in 1 platform that anybody will be able to search across, not just the code, but the agendas and minutes that led to the adoption of those code updates."
Nichols and Bush also said the county is vetting planning consultants to assist with the substantive code updates (phase 1 and phase 2) and with reformatting (phase 3). Staff described the Municode implementation as largely a technical publishing effort (OCR and upload of existing PDFs) to be followed by the substantive code audit and reform work with contracted planning consultants.
Shannon estimated that, after contract execution by CivicPlus, the county could have preliminary access to Municode by early second quarter 2024. Staff asked commissioners to consider participating in code‑audit work and possibly serving on ad hoc subcommittees as consultants are selected and scopes are developed.
