Advocacy alert! Planning & Zoning in Clark County is under threat

This morn­ing, I received word from the Clark Coalition, a local advo­ca­cy and gov­ern­ment watch­dog group, about a very dan­ger­ous devel­op­ment. According to Clark Coalition: 

At the September 3^rd Planning Commission meet­ing, Magistrate Chris Davis — with­out the autho­riza­tion of the Clark County Fiscal Court — pro­posed the for­ma­tion of a sub­com­mit­tee to review the zon­ing ordi­nance with the inten­tion of rec­om­mend­ing changes or poten­tial­ly “doing away with com­plete­ly” [plan­ning & zoning]. 

This short-sight­ed pro­pos­al threat­ens the many ben­e­fits that our com­mu­ni­ty gains by hav­ing plan­ning & zoning. 

Just the very men­tion of pos­si­bly scrap­ping our plan­ning and zon­ing sys­tem is ter­ri­fy­ing to me. There are very good rea­sons why vir­tu­al­ly every city and most coun­ty gov­ern­ments in the US have some form of plan­ning and zoning. 

One cau­tion­ary tale involves my home­town of Campton. There is no plan­ning and zon­ing at all in Campton and Wolfe County, and the results are painful­ly obvi­ous. A recent exam­ple is the loca­tion of an out-of-state cryp­tocur­ren­cy min­ing com­pa­ny in a rur­al part of the coun­ty. The facil­i­ty is a ter­ri­ble nui­sance, eat­ing up huge quan­ti­ties of elec­tric­i­ty and ema­nat­ing much noise, while pro­vid­ing no eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits to the coun­ty. Virtually no one in the area want­ed this facil­i­ty, yet local offi­cials’ hands are tied because there are no rules gov­ern­ing devel­op­ments in Wolfe County. 

Here in Winchester and Clark County, we are able to set our own rules about new devel­op­ments because of a ded­i­cat­ed plan­ning staff and vision­ary lead­ers who long ago rec­og­nized the need and devel­oped our sys­tem of plan­ning and zoning. 

Now this sys­tem is fac­ing threats from with­in. I join with the Clark Coalition in urg­ing Clark County cit­i­zens to get involved and attend meet­ings of the Fiscal Court and the Planning Subcommittee to observe and com­ment when allowed. Make your voice heard.

The next meet­ing of the Clark Fiscal Court will be this Wednesday, Oct. 9 at 8:30 AM in the Clark County Courthouse. The Planning Subcommittee will meet at 1:30 PM on the same day.

You can read the posi­tion paper of the Clark Coalition on Planning and Zoning here.