Ordinance Review Committee
Meeting Minutes
Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Present: Carol Ogilvie, Charlie Sorenson, Jon Miner, Harry Wolhandler, Don Scott, Lisa Anderson
Absent: Mary Ann Noyer

Agenda –Main Goal of today is discussion centered on Article V.

Minutes of previous meeting 8/13/2018 – All voted in favor to approve.

Article V – Carol shared the working draft for article V., discussion ensued. The committee chose to add “…or height…” to the first definition and deleted dimensions in the third definition.

5.1.2. –Committee discussed “except that natural, but limited” what does it mean? There is lots of case law surrounding it. The committee decided it was a better fit under 5.2.2.

5.2.2 –we changed “petitioner” to “applicant” to keep with uniformity across the document. This type of change was also made with respect “to one” year vs. “12 months.”

5.2.4 – added “…of the structure…”

5.3.1 –based on the suggestion to strike “…provided that such activity conforms…” sentence. Leaving in the last sentence in that article.

5.4 –removed redundancies and added 5.4.3 “A nonconforming lot may be expanded, even though the expansion does not make the lot conforming.

 Home-based business –Committee then discussed how best to handle home based occupation and home based business. This was a continuation of last meeting with new examples from other towns on how to best handle it. Harrisville is unique with the number of people who have businesses or work from a home office. We needed to figure out how this works into our zoning. The committee opted for updated language that spells them out clearly and differentiates them based on criteria. in addition, some language currently is overly restrictive. Updated language would allow a process for the selectmen to decide if someone needs to go to the ZBA for a special exception for a home based business or if criteria is met that resident only has a home occupation (home office).We decided to remove requirement for number of non-resident employees and site plan review; both may be requested case by case through the special exception.

* Next meeting of the committee is Tuesday, Sept 18th, @5:30 pm.