Nicole Caudle, Brigham City’s city attorney, told the council on Dec. 4 that staff are nearing completion of a comprehensive rewrite of the city code and will present the work to the council in chunks over the coming months.

Caudle said the undertaking is primarily legal cleanup, editing for parallel structure and readability, consolidation of definitions, and removal of obsolete language. She estimated the effort is roughly 70% complete and stressed that most of the proposed changes will not alter existing policy: “Very few policy changes so far,” she said, describing most edits as grammatical or organizational.

The code update will include a renumbering of sections to make the system more intuitive, a matrix that maps prior section numbers to the new structure, and a package of “full repeal and reenact” ordinances rather than traditional redlined strikeouts. Caudle said the repeal-and-reenact format will be accompanied by a separate list of any substantive policy changes so council members and the public can quickly identify what has been changed.

Caudle also presented a staff proposal to create a consolidated fee schedule as a single ordinance (a proposed new Title 4). She emphasized the consolidated schedule would collect existing fees in one place and would not create new fees. “There’s no new fee. We’re just putting them all in one place,” she said, adding that any future fee increases would still come before the council in ordinance form.

She warned that land-use and zoning sections of the code will require a longer public process, including planning commission hearings and council hearings. Those chapters, she said, account for the portions of the code likely to prompt policy questions from the council.

Caudle said staff will provide three ways for council members and the public to review the changes: the full proposed code text, a searchable matrix that shows where prior sections moved, and a summary ‘key’ explaining how titles and sections have been reorganized. Christina Bosque, the city recorder, will retain and publish prior versions so the public and staff can trace historical changes.

Council members asked for clarifications about renumbering, how the publishing vendor will handle the new numbering and where policy intent will be shown; Caudle said the ordinance adopting each section will contain the policy intent and the online publisher will host the adopted code in the agreed format. She said the city will continue to publish the code through its current vendor, American Legal, and staff expect some lead time from the publisher for the conversion.

The council did not vote on code changes at the meeting; Caudle said staff will bring Title 1 and Title 2 to the next council agenda for review and potential action, with Title 3 and the more complex land-use sections to follow later.