KANNAPOLIS — It remained contentious to the end, but a proposed countywide planning and zoning ordinance is no longer proposed in Kannapolis — it’s law.
After three years of writing, months of workshops, public hearings and protests, several votes on Monday and a final call for delaying the vote by at least two more months, the City Council adopted the Unified Development Ordinance.
The ordinance got the five votes it needed to pass on first reading, with Mayor Ray Moss, Mayor Pro Tem Ken Geathers and councilmen Roger Haas, Randy Cauthen and Bob Misenheimer supporting it.
Councilmen Richard Anderson and Phil Meacham opposed the ordinance.
“Council has not sat down and discussed the issues,” Anderson said.“... There are a lot of things in this UDO presented here tonight that Richard Anderson cannot vote for.”
For example, Anderson said he opposed giving final authority for some decisions to the city’s planning and adjustment boards, authority still given to those boards in the document adopted Monday.
Moss countered that in the public hearing and discussions the council already has had, he felt able to have his opinions heard and to take into account the opinions of others.
Kannapolis became the second city to adopt the ordinance, following Concord. Cabarrus County and Harrisburg, Mount Pleasant and the new municipality of Midland have yet to adopt it.
Until questions about setting fees and collecting money are resolved, the council voted to leave out a part of the ordinance that requires developers to monetarily offset the impact their developments have on schools.
The ordinance brings changes to the business of development and the rules of land use-planning and zoning, making them standard across government boundaries. Along with the ordinance, the council adopted a new zoning map.
City Manager David Hales said the new ordinance benefits not only the city but the people who’ll build its houses and businesses as growth continues to push into
Cabarrus.
“For the future ... many builders are anxious for some stability,” Hales said. “... While this is not a perfect document ... I think it’s a product that has extreme merit to help us deal with growth.”
Geathers moved for adoption of the ordinance, but Haas substituted a motion to replace the section of the ordinance dealing with home-based businesses with an alternative section written by Planning Director Mike Legg.
Legg wrote the alternative section after listening to the concerns of some of the home business owners who have protested the ordinance at the council’s meetings in recent months.
Though Legg said the new ordinance gives existing home businesses more leeway to operate than the one it replaces, home-based business owners have said they fear for their property rights.
While Legg said he favored the section already in the ordinance, he offered the council the alternative section, which would set even looser standards on home occupations and allowed some businesses the new ordinance does not.
Haas, who worked on the steering committee that helped write the ordinance, said he didn’t see why the city couldn’t live with those looser standards for existing businesses, since the ordinance aims at controlling new business.
“We’ve done so much deliberating, I think sometimes we’ve lost our way of what the ordinance was to start with,”he said. “The substitution of this section, in my opinion, does not compromise the integrity of the
UDO.”
Haas’ motion failed by a vote of 4-3, with only Moss and Geathers siding with him.
Anderson tried to substitute a motion to table the ordinance until January and hold at least one council workshop in the meantime for Geathers’ motion, but board attorney Walter Safrit said the council’s own rules of order prohibit such a motion.
Anderson then moved to suspend the rules, but that motion fell short of the five votes needed to pass, to which some of the few people present in the audience who had protested the ordinance complained loudly and vulgarly.
The council will consider the ordinance next month on a second reading, normally a formality that requires only a simple majority to pass.
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