Candidates agree: UDO needs upgrades
By Frank Ruggiero
ruggiero@wataugademocrat.com
The following is part two in a series on the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce’s “Meet the Candidates” forum, held Thursday, Sept. 13.

Boone municipal candidates offered their opinions on the Unified Development Ordinance and other topics at last Thursday’s Boone Area Chamber of Commerce “Meet the Candidates” forum.

After the candidates’ introduced themselves and shared their priorities, mediator Ron Hester noted that there seemed to be a general consensus that the town’s UDO is cumbersome, not user-friendly and needs revisiting. He asked the candidates to elaborate.

Town council candidate and planning commissioner Liz Aycock said the council would have to examine the document piece by piece and determine its negative effects on residents. “…If we look at our comprehensive plan that we already have in place, I think we can work with that to make the UDO more reflective of the comprehensive plan, and it’ll be more streamlined,” she said.

Council candidate Jeremy Blocker said the council should revise the UDO through a series of community forums and the formation of a task force. “I think it (the UDO) is burdensome and cumbersome,” he said, adding he knows the troubles builders and residents must endure when developing. Blocker said he built an addition to his Boone house, “and, let me tell you, it wasn’t an easy thing to do.” Ideally, Blocker said he’d like to see a UDO with regulations “straight across the board where everyone can understand it.”

Council candidate Ethan Dodson said he felt obliged to read through the entire document and, for one, fix the numerous grammatical errors. He mentioned several seemingly unrealistic goals he had in life: win the lottery, travel through Europe, and build a house in Boone. For those seeking to build a home in town, he said the UDO is “terribly confusing.”

Council candidate Kevin Freeman agreed, saying the document needs a thorough rewording so it won’t read like Chinese stereo instructions. “But it’s just another one of those things, to get more of a layman’s understanding,” he said, adding the UDO should “make sure everyone’s on the same page, so we all have a basic understanding of where we’re coming from.”

Incumbent council candidate Lynne Mason said it’s widely understood the UDO can be a “problematic document,” but that the Boone Town Council worked diligently to adopt the document in 1997.

“That aside, planning is critical to our community, and the town does have land use planning and that is necessary for the growth pressures that we’re facing,” she said, adding that a smart growth audit commissioned by the town council will identify the UDO’s problem areas and the proper means to address them.

Council candidate and planning commissioner Stephen Phillips acknowledged that the UDO and the building code are both “definitely a mess,” in that they seem designed for cities more like Hickory and Lenoir, where the land area is relatively flat.

While in college, Phillips majored in city planning, even completing an internship in Trier, Germany, where he worked on its version of a UDO, which included illustrations, diagrams and other features to make the document more user-friendly.

“They are easy to understand, even for me, and German is not my first language by any means,” he said. “If we can make it readable to someone who doesn’t read the language, I think we’ve done a lot.”

Incumbent council candidate Bunk Spann said most everyone on the council and residents would agree that dealing with the UDO is difficult, which is written in legalese for obvious reasons. “But I believe we really ought to work to make it more user-friendly,” he said.

While the council has addressed this matter, it’s been more of a piecemeal process, and Spann said it has not brought satisfaction to him and his fellow council members. The smart growth audit, he said, “will likely lead to major reform in the UDO,” possibly by means of a form-based code.

Incumbent council candidate Dempsey Wilcox recalled the UDO’s original adoption in 1997, but acknowledged “it’s a mess and it needs to be redone.” He agreed with Spann’s suggestion of form-based code, but also said the comprehensive plan, which was overhauled by the Boone Area Planning Commission in 2006, should be revisited, since public interest seemed to wane by the time it was adopted.

“We had meetings on it and there were more members of the press there than there were members of the public,” he said.

Boone mayor Loretta Clawson, running for re-election, said that all towns have regulations and not every regulation will fit every resident. “But I do think that there are things we could do with the UDO that would make it better and more accessible to more people,” she said.

Clawson noted that North Carolina is experiencing considerable growth and that all municipalities must face it accordingly. With the town awaiting the results of a smart growth audit, Clawson said local stakeholders are coming forward to discuss their concerns. “We’re certainly working on that,” she said. “We’re more than willing to work with the town of Boone citizens, and we’ll do the best we can.”

Mayoral candidate Tim Wilson suggested that the council form a review committee to study the UDO and “resolve changes for property owners that want to build on property,” while speeding up the permitting process for approvals, including matters that require board of adjustment and planning commission approval.