By: Cassady Rosenblum
The Tucker County Planning Commission met to go over a draft of a new ordinance still in the proposal stages. The commission intended to present the proposed ordinance, which deals with new housing subdivisions, to the public this month. However, due to delays related to COVID-19, and because of disputes over the language of the ordinance, those public meetings have been postponed indefinitely.
Tucker County is one of the few counties in the state that does not have a subdivision ordinance. The intention of the ordinance is to ensure that future developers in Tucker County build their units in a professional, proper manner. For the ordinance to pass, two out of three county commissioners must vote in favor of it after a period of public comment.
Over the course of the summer, County Commissioners Lowell Moore and Mike Roseneau have attended various Planning Commission meetings, and have expressed agreement with the planning commission that the county needs such an ordinance to protect the public from sloppy developers. However, at the meeting, conducted over Zoom, some confusion and discord broke out. According to West Virginia state law, the ordinance must address both major and minor subdivisions– major referring to large projects, and minor referring to smaller ones.
With respect to the minor subdivision language, Rosenau raised some concerns over how the ordinance could unintentionally impact landowners who merely want to sell off a few acres of land to their children or to friends. Similarly, Councilmember Ben Herrick raised the scenario where a landowner needs to sell off a few acres to pay for medical bills, or another such hardship. Both men argued that in these situations, the landowner should not have to deal with any added bureaucracy, and essentially be exempt from the ordinance.
While the other councilmembers agreed with the spirit of Rosenau and Herrick’s comments, councilmember Tim McClean noted that family members selling land to each other are the only parties exempt from the ordinance as the language is written currently. Everyone else is considered “the public,” and is therefore subject to the ordinance. The original thinking behind that distinction, McClean explained, was to prevent any bad-faith developers from buying a small parcel of land and building sub-standard apartments on it. Rosenau indicated that even so, he was not happy with the current language, and wants to ensure landowners in Tucker County can complete small sales of their property the same way they always have, without having to interact with the planning commission.
The planning commission thus retired tasked with a thorny yet familiar mission to bureaucrats everywhere: how to solve one problem without creating more.
