Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
099 <br /> STATEMENT OF JUSTIFICATION <br /> BACKGROUND <br /> In the fall of 1981, the Orange County Board of Commissioners took <br /> several significant steps toward improved planning in Orange County. Among <br /> these were the adoption of a new comprehensive Zoning Ordinance, Land Use <br /> Plan and Zoning Atlas. One result of these actions was the application of <br /> zoning to Hillsborough Township for the first time. <br /> The Land Use Plan provided that commercial activities were appropriate <br /> in certain identified activity nodes and generally inappropriate outside <br /> these nodes. However, the Planning Staff and the Board of Commissioners <br /> apparently believed that provisions should be made for then-existing <br /> commercial uses which were not within an activity node. The vehicle to <br /> provide for these uses was the EC-5 (existing commercial ) classification, <br /> which was intended to be applied to existing commercial uses in previously <br /> unzoned townships. <br /> Part of the Planning Staff' s preliminary work on the Zoning Atlas <br /> included the preparation of maps purporting to identify the then-existing <br /> commercial uses. These maps are currently in the .possession of the <br /> Planning Department. The majority of the commercial uses"depicted on these <br /> maps were assigned a number corresponding to numbers on charts prepared by <br /> the Planning Staff (Orange County Commissioners' Minutes Book 14, Pages <br /> 507-512 (attached)). These charts assigned commercial zoning <br /> classifications to each of the numbered uses on the maps. However, several <br /> uses identified on the maps as commercial were not assigned numbers. It <br /> has been suggested that these uses were intended to be nonconforming, and <br /> this interpretation garners support from Planning Board Memoranda <br />