Morristown boards hold zoning change hearings

The bill will effectively end towns’ abilities to allow single-family zoning in their bylaws, instead making duplexes — and larger multifamily homes — legal anywhere residential development is allowed.

Thomas said, at both the Oct. 16 selectboard public hearing on the zoning revisions and the Oct. 18 village trustees’ hearing, that the real “meat and potatoes” of this year’s bylaw revisions expand on last year’s extensive overhaul of design criteria, bringing those new standards further out from the village downtown core.

Both public hearings were short affairs. Among the changes proposed by the planning council this year:

• Allowing one or two new housing units as “adaptive reuse” of accessory buildings in high density residential areas, which Thomas said is a good way to “add density without changing the character of the neighborhood.”

• A reworking of design criteria for areas that are not in the historic district. Last year’s zoning changes made significant changes to the town’s historic preservation standards, but only in certain parts of town. This year’s changes add Park Street to the historic district.

• Reducing parking requirements to one parking space per unit, which Thomas said is one of the few changes this year made to comply with the HOME Act.

• Minor changes to bylaws governing gravel extraction, which planning council chair Etienne Hancock said was done at the development review board’s request, and which will be further strengthened over the next several months.

This year’s round of bylaw changes haven’t gotten the populace as fired up as last year, when changes to short-term rental rules and a thorough overhauling of the town’s historic preservation ordinances drew scores of people to a planning council meeting adopting the changes. Still, selectboard vice-chair Don McDowell noted that the proposed bylaw changes have elicited “substantial” public concern.

Thomas said the proposed language changes have all been “very public.” In a change from last year, when many people began complaining that the council and development review board were not offering remote access to meetings or recording them for posterity, the planning council began offering remote access. The review board has not followed suit yet.

Still, Thomas said the time for public comment at the planning council level is done, at least for this round of revisions.

“This is the finish line, not the starting line, for all these changes,” Thomas said.

The trustees and selectboard met for their annual joint meeting Wednesday after press deadline. They are expected to approve the bylaws separately at their next meetings — both boards have to approve the same language for the changes to go into effect.