The North Yarmouth Select Board and Planning Board met on Oct. 22 to discuss a long list of potential changes to the town’s land use ordinance. Eloise Goldsmith / The Forecaster

The town of North Yarmouth is engaged in a long-term effort to clean up the town’s land use ordinance with an eye toward streamlining and clarifying processes.

The Select Board and Planning Board met on Oct. 22 to discuss changes to the town’s code that governs land use amendments and an audit performed by a consulting firm, North Star Planning, which has recommended a slate of updates to the town’s land use ordinance that will take over a year to implement.

On the issue of land use amendments, the group went back and forth on the merits of imposing fees on applicants who propose changes to the ordinance and discussed giving the Planning Board the explicit ability to initiate amendments to the land use ordinance.

This section of the ordinance governs, for example, the process that allows residents to put forward a citizens’ petition to amend the ordinance. That happened somewhat recently, in 2022, when a petition effort to limit the number of building permits in and near the village center successfully passed via referendum.

The Planning Board and the Select Board – the latter via its attorney Mark Bower of the firm Jensen Baird – have both drafted a new, longer version of this section of the land use ordinance, which is currently just two paragraphs long.

Besides detailing the petition process, the “general” section of the current ordinance just notes that the ordinance can “be amended by a majority vote of the registered voters in attendance at a regular town meeting or special town meeting called by the municipal officers” and notes that the there must be a public hearing prior to the town meeting vote.

Planning Board Secretary Jeff Brown said he didn’t appreciate the fact that the Select Board’s version currently states that “the Planning Board may recommend to the Select Board any non-policy administrative amendments to the ordinance, without prior referral from the Select Board.”

“As it reads, the Select Board tells us what to do when, and we hold a public hearing, and that’s our function in this,” said Brown, who said he had been motivated to join the Planning Board in order to shape policy.

Later, Select Board Chair Andrea Berry said she thought the Planning Board should have an “origination” option for ordinance changes.

On the issue of fees, the Select Board’s version of the changes note that fees should be levied on applicants who are filing to request a proposed amendment. These fees would include, for example, a publishing and public notice fee and a non-refundable application fee.

Bower, the attorney, said that “it’s very common to have provisions in an ordinance that require an applicant to put in an escrow for peer review services, because the question is: Who do you want paying for those services?”

“I think that if you start trying to charge fees, you just chase people away from using the application process … and instead (they will use the) citizen-initiated process,” said Planning Board Chair Paul Whitmarsh, referencing the citizen petition process.

In the end, the Select Board agreed to have Bower work off of the Planning Board’s version of the document and synthesize the two.

Later, the group heard from Ben Smith, principal and founder of North Star Planning, about recommendations that his company made for modifying the town’s land use code.

In 2023 the firm delivered an audit to the town to clarify and simplify existing ordinances. The suggestions in the audit constitute more than a year’s worth of work, according to Smith.

Recommendations from North Star Planning include creating a new submission checklist that would be shorter and less “overwhelming” for applicants, reorganizing the text of the ordinance itself; creating a clearer definition of Pocket Neighborhoods – defined by some as a group of houses or apartments clustered around a shared space – and where they can be developed in town; and creating a threshold for smaller projects that could be reviewed via an expedited process.

The group discussed which of the changes to prioritize, and honed in on developing a minor site plan process, reviewing Groundwater Protection Overlay District best management practices, potentially allowing waivers from site plan performance standards, and re-working the town’s practice of phasing subdivisions “based on the capacity of capital facilities.”

Smith agreed to come back to the town with a revised memo outlining what North Yarmouth can commit to working on between now and the spring.