Agenda - 06-03-2008-5b5b - Laserfiche WebLink

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1~~°~ lJ ~~ ~ 19 1 a. Telecommunications Towers: Amendments to.promote consistency with December 1, 2007 revisions to NC General Statutes concerning Wireless 3 Telecommunications Facilities. 4 5 Craig Benedict said that the County has now amended its ordinances to be consistent 6 with the State, and certain processes that promote co-location have been streamlined. Also, the 7 fees. that are collected allow the County to have experts on behalf of the County to research the 8 issues for public safety purposes. The balloon requirements have been amended for better . 9 visibility. Also, there are more detailed requirements for approval. This is a major change to the 10 Telecommunications ordinance. These amendments will continue to be able to have a Master 11 Telecommunications Plan to promote the limited amount of towers and more co-location. This 12 is to be consistent with State law. The ordinance was reformatted, but the good ideas from the 13 previous ordinance were not lost. He thanked the Attorney's Office for helping with this 14 amendment. 15 Chair Jacobs asked, after all is said and done, if this would wind up about the same 16 place that it was or significantly under where it was. He cannot imagine that the legislation will 17 let the County actually have more control. 18 Mr. Speaker said that the short answer is you did not lose any regulatory authority, you 19 just have to do several things differently. 20 Jay Bryan said that the general sense is that towers can be placed anywhere in the 21 County if they fit a set of criteria, and the public really has no ability to prevent individual towers 22 from being located if they meet the various criteria in the ordinance. 23 Craig Benedict said that the criteria are there to protect against the proliferation of 24 towers. For example, the need for the tower has to be proven and that there are not alternate 25 locations that could also serve the need. The federal government has certain interests to allow '~?6 the information highway to proceed. It is not an easy denial in those cases. Z7 28 PUBLIC COMIV(ENT: 29 NONE. 30 31 A motion was made by Commissioner Carey, seconded by Commissioner Foushee to 32 forward the matter to the Planning Board for review and comment with a request that a 33 recommendation be submitted back to the BOGC no later than May 20, 2008. 34 VOTE: UNANIMOUS 35 36 37 b. Planned Development: Amendments to address inconsistencies between existing 38 ordinance requirements and NC General Statutes, specifically the requirement that 39 imposed conditions be mutually agreed upon by the County and petitioner. 40 41 Zoning Administrator Michael Harvey introduced this item. He said that he has been 42 working on this with the Attorney's Office. As the Attorney's Office and staff began earnest work 43 on developing the conditional use process as well as beginning to finalize work on the 44 Agricultural Services Enterprise project, it was discovered that there were several provisions in 45 the existing ordinance that were not consistent with some recent changes of the general statute 46 regular standards, specifically focusing on how conditions are proposed in certain projects. At 47 the time it was suggested that it was essential to bring the~existing regulatory standards in line 48 with general statute requirements. The proposal is to amend Article 7 and modify how 49 conditions are proposed for planned development projects. Essentially the change would 50 require that any condition proposed be initially agreed to by the Board of County Commissioners l~