City Council on Tuesday approved paying the planning and architectural consulting firm TSW $130,000 to guide a complete update of Statesboro’s zoning, sign and subdivision ordinances.

The revision of these city laws governing land uses and development could take two years and will require extensive public input, said City Manager Charles Penny.

At a previous council and mayor work session Sept. 21, Planning and Development Director Kathy Field had reported that Statesboro’s overall Zoning Ordinance was adopted Feb. 15, 1977, and thus is 44 years old, that the “Sign Ordinance,” added within the zoning law on June 16, 2009, is now 12 years old and that the separate Subdivision Ordinance dates back 19 years, to Jan. 4, 2002.

District 2 Councilwoman Paulette Chavers asked Field how often, in her experience, such ordinances are typically reworked.

“Well, certainly more (often) than 44 years,” Field answered, “and they’re usually amended periodically.”

Field arrived in her current role with Statesboro’s city government in April 2020 with more than 30 years of experience in planning and development in other communities.

A well maintained zoning ordinance would typically be “tweaked” from time to time to remove outdated provisions and add new uses that weren’t common when the ordinance was first adopted, she said last month.

For example, assisted living homes, although common now, are not mentioned in Statesboro’s ordinance. As an example of outdated provisions, Field noted references to “tourist homes.” The ordinance lists these with hotels, rooming houses, institutional homes, residential clubs and motor courts as kinds of “multiple dwellings.”

“A good ordinance is updated periodically,” Field said.  “Certainly from two to five years you make some changes as you go along because you want to keep it fresh.”

Timely signs

Although the “Sign Ordinance,” portion is newer than the overall zoning framework, developers and  sign  company  owners  have  noted that it does not reflect the most recent sign technologies and styles.

That topic came up at the Aug. 17 meeting when the council approved variances allowing Renfroe Outdoor LLC to update two “Trivision” rotating-prism billboards – one on Northside Drive East and one on Georgia Highway 67 – to LED displays, as well as a variance allowing Whitfield Signs to install a vinyl wrap on a wall of Dolan’s BBQ on South Main Street. Council members commented that fewer variances might be needed if the ordinances were updated.

The Subdivision Ordinance, which sets the requirements for developers dividing land into lots and creating streets and other infrastructure, has not been amended since it was created 19 years ago, Field said.

‘Major undertaking’

During the Sept. 21 work session, Penny advised the elected officials that the city staff could not do these updates on its own.

“This is always a major undertaking for any city, and it can sometimes be very controversial, especially the sign ordinance,” Penny said. “Folks are very protective of their signs. But if we do the process right, we include the community, include the users as a part of that discussion as we are developing it, hopefully we can avoid these rewrites becoming contentious issues.”

Other cities and counties where he has been a manager have always called in outside help for ordinance updates of this kind, he said.

“If this were done in-house we would never get it done because we have our day-to-day stuff and we need someone who can focus, we need someone who’s going to bring with them some experience from other communities,” Penny said.

Contract add-on

What he proposed during Tuesday morning’s regular council meeting was an amendment to an existing contract the city has with TSW. The council last December awarded the Atlanta-based firm a contract with a “not to exceed” price of $100,000 to guide development of a new Statesboro Downtown Master Plan. Consultants from TSW hosted a community input workshop for that purpose in June.

In a new proposal dated Sept. 28, TSW offered to undertake the zoning and subdivision ordinance updates for $130,000 and reassign $10,000 originally budgeted for the Downtown Master Plan work to the ordinance update effort.

TSW proposed an 18-month timeline for the ordinance rewrites, extending from the coming winter of 2021-2022 to summer 2023. The city intends to divide the $130,000 added expenditure over three fiscal years.

TSW will announce goals for the project at a regular City Council meeting and direct the public to an online form for initial comments, the proposal states. Then the consulting team’s legal counsel will review the existing regulations, and the team will analyze how recommendations of the Comprehensive Plan and Downtown Master Plan are reflected in the city’s Code of Ordinances.

Public input

A community workshop, review sessions with the mayor and council and a later “draft code open house” are proposed for further input as the team works with city staff to write the revised ordinances.

District 1 Councilman Phil Boyum asked if the city sought bids for this work. Penny acknowledged that it hadn’t but said that this was the kind of service the city government wouldn’t seek price bids for anyway. The city would have issued a request for proposals and negotiated a contract if it didn’t already have one with TSW, he said.

“Staff is very comfortable with the quality of work that we’ve been receiving from TSW and so we recommend extending the contract with them,” Penny said. “As you can see, it’s not cheap, $130,000, but you’re also talking about a process that could take over two years, that will involve a lot of community involvement, a lot of meetings with sign people… a lot of working with developers.”

The vote approving the contract addition was 5-0 on a motion from District 4 Councilman John Riggs seconded by District 3 Councilwoman Venus Mack.