CANTON — Town Council hosted a presentation Thursday night from its zoning laws and code consultant, who shared observations and recommendations from a town zoning audit completed over the last few months.
Monica Ryan, principal planner for River Street Planning & Development, Troy, provided an overview of the current code’s strengths and deficiencies, highlighting potential updates to zoning districts and land use tools.
“The good news is your code is actually fairly structurally sound,” Ms. Ryan told the board. “All the general elements of a zoning code are there. Your legal process for different types of approvals that are state guided or state regulated are all in place correctly. And this is not actually a given, despite the fact that it should be.”
The audit process began as a response to the October adoption of Canton’s Comprehensive Plan, a vision and framework for the community’s current and future infrastructure needs.
“The Comprehensive Plan doesn’t have the legal teeth,” Ms. Ryan said. “Zoning has the legal teeth that goes with the Comprehensive Plan, but they are very interrelated.”
A municipality’s zoning code, Ms. Ryan said, is typically based on a comprehensive plan, and Canton’s zoning code was first adopted in 1997, when a decades-old comprehensive plan was in place. With little influence from the previous comprehensive plan, Canton’s 1997 zoning code and subsequent updates have not been directly tied to a comprehensive community vision, though the code was influenced by changing community needs and ideas.
Any updates to the current code, Ms. Ryan said, will mark the first time zoning and a comprehensive plan have been intrinsically tied for the town and its five zoning districts: rural, residential, commercial, hamlet and wildlife management area.
In Ms. Ryan’s memorandum outlining the key observations and recommendations, she first emphasized the need for a complete definitions section within the code.
“The definitions section of a zoning code is extremely important,” she said. “It defines the uses, it defines the tools, and many aspects of the zoning code are affected by the definitions section. And if there isn’t one, you’re lacking a really important guiding tool.”
The town’s code does reference a planner’s dictionary, stating, “Except as may be specifically defined within this Local Law, all terms or phrases shall be as defined in ‘American Planners Dictionary’ for this Zoning Code.”
But Ms. Ryan argued the few definitions and planning dictionary do not provide sufficient and clarified definitions of all zoning terms and uses, pointing out the planning dictionary hasn’t been updated in nearly 20 years.
Ms. Ryan also suggested scaling back what projects require special permits, which have become overused since the 1980s and 1990s, she said.
For example, the current code requires a special use permit for all home occupations.
“So that means if someone wants to do a home occupation — and they’re defined very loosely — anything you would normally think of as a home occupation requires a trip to the planning board and a special use permit,” she said. “That seems a little heavy handed.”
Two additional recommendations involve creating zoning overlays, one along town gateways that could potentially rely on some type of public investment for signage and landscaping, and one along the Grasse River as a waterfront protection area.
A waterfront overlay would create a protective corridor on top of the district already assigned along the river, buffering a certain distance off the shoreline perpendicular to the waterfront.
Such overlay recommendations are incorporated into Canton’s Comprehensive Plan, as well as the Grasse River Waterfront Revitalization Plan.
To make the code more readable and “user friendly,” Ms. Ryan recommended information be synthesized into tables and the code include simple illustrations and graphics.
Following the review of Ms. Ryan’s audit, collaboration between the planning board, zoning board of appeals, economic development office, town committees and Canton legal counsels will yield a first draft of potential updates, followed by the standard public review, hearing and adoption process.
If the town decides to move forward with the updating process, Ms. Ryan said the complete project could take about six to eight months.
“There’s a lot of little things I would clean up in the code and move around a little bit,” she said. “But for the most part, a lot of the nuts and bolts are in really good shape.”
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February 16, 2020 at 04:52AM
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Canton town zoning 'fairly structurally sound,' updates recommended - NNY360
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