Orange County, Hillsborough staff review decades of interlocal planning agreements including COCA, Wissamba and school-capacity pacts

Summary

County and town planners described the history, current use and limits of several interlocal planning agreements — the Central Orange Coordinated Area (COCA), courtesy review rules, the Wissamba water-and-sewer agreement and school-capacity memoranda — and said several will likely need updates as the county and town rewrite land-use plans.

Orange County planning staff and Hillsborough planning officials on Feb. 17 reviewed a series of interlocal planning agreements that have governed land use, utilities and service coordination around the town for two decades.

Perdita Holtz, Orange County deputy director for long-range planning and administration, traced the Central Orange Coordinated Area — known as COCA — from a 2006 planning phase through an interlocal land-management agreement in 2009 and the joint land-use plan adopted in 2013 and last amended in 2020. She said COCA originally established urbanizing areas around Hillsborough and set rules for which jurisdiction’s development standards would apply to properties in the mapped areas. “Planners do like to have acronyms,” Holtz said, noting the convention in long-running planning efforts.

The pair of jurisdictions also rely on a staff-level courtesy review agreement that Holtz said is explicitly limited…

Orange County, Hillsborough staff review decades of interlocal planning agreements including COCA, Wissamba and school-capacity pacts

Summary

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