A crowd from the Wasco County Planning Commission, including chair Russell Hargrave and alternate Mike Davis, attended Wednesday afternoon’s board of county commissioners meeting to discuss updating the county’s comprehensive land-use plan.
And the commissioners couldn’t have been more pleased, unanimously coming to a consensus to allow the planning commission to begin phase one of the update, which is expected to take three to six months and includes researching grants, doing an internal review to define needs and benefits, outreach to other agencies, a statewide comparison, prioritizing list of needed updates and then vetting their findings with the county commissioners.
“The approach looks good and really impressive,” commission chair Scott Hege said.
“Thank you all,” commissioner Steve Kramer added. “We appreciate your help with this.”
The current version of the plan was developed by planning staff in response to Oregon State land use law requirements in 1983. Since then, many minor updates have been made over the years, most recently in 2010.
“I want us to examine where we are more restricted than the state and if there’s not a good reason, get rid of it,” commissioner Rod Runyon said. “That’s real high on the priority list.”
Hargrave agreed and said he wanted to get rid of frustrations by the public by making the plan easier to understand and thus user friendly. The update would allow staff to do their jobs better as well.
Hargrave also noted this is a standard statewide process and Wasco can learn from other counties.
Davis went over all five phases of the plan, which were developed over multiple work sessions.
Phase II, which would also take three to six months and must first be approved by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, includes defining a citizen involvement strategy, planning an evaluation process, an initial outreach to the public, topic specific public commission meetings and feedback on staff recommendations.
In Phase III, which must be approved by the county commissioners, planning staff would develop a work program and tasks, facilitate public involvement and then seek DLCD approval of the work program.
Planning staff will complete tasks in the work program, hold public hearings and solicit feedback and then report to the DLCD for review in Phase IV. The DLCD will review each work task and come up with a final decision in Phase V.
The entire plan is expected to take up to three years to complete.
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