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Bangor planners preview land-development code changes to meet new state housing laws
Summary
Planning staff told the Business & Economic Development Committee they will bring draft ordinance language next month to conform local rules to three recent state laws that expand ADUs, relax parking rules and allow residential use in commercial zones.
Anya Colette, the city’s planning officer, told the Bangor Business & Economic Development Committee on the meeting that staff are preparing ordinance changes to align the city’s land development code with three recently passed state laws (LD 1829, LD 04/27 and LD 997).
Colette said LD 1829 will require allowing accessory dwelling units on both single-family and multi-family lots and will increase density allowances (for example, requiring local codes to allow up to four units on a 5,000-square-foot lot inside the growth boundary). “We are still waiting on rulemaking for these 3 laws,” Colette said, and staff plan to present draft code changes to the committee next month.
The planning officer described several local implications: working farms along Ohio Street are currently legally nonconforming in some respects but nonconformity transfers to new owners; direct farm-product sales on some lots are currently prohibited because those lots are not on a major arterial; and projects that create three or four dwelling units would move to staff review rather than planning-board review under the new thresholds, with planning-board approval remaining for five or more units.
On parking, staff said LD 04/27 limits municipal parking requirements to no more than one space per unit and requires allowing shared-parking agreements; it also expands the allowable distance for off-site parking from the city’s previous 500-foot rule to up to 0.25 miles. Colette said the change will require rewording local rules and that the city should notify the parking committee because the change could significantly affect the city’s parking district.
Committee members pressed staff on enforcement and local impacts. One councilor raised Saint Joseph’s (900 Broadway) as an example and asked whether the institution would be allowed to remove buffer trees; Colette replied that buffering is still required where parking abuts residential districts and that code enforcement is responsible for addressing violations.
The committee moved and seconded a motion to advance one of the planning items (the record shows the motion was made and seconded but no final vote was recorded in the transcript). Colette said staff will return with draft ordinance language and that the city will follow state rulemaking language where the statute is unclear.
Next steps: staff will prepare draft ordinance text for committee review next month and the committee flagged parking, planning-board training and public engagement as topics to incorporate in subsequent drafts.
