 I'm not going to spend much time talking about that this morning or afternoon, but I think one of the fundamental questions that most anybody would do after listening to him talk is ask yourself, well, what can we do about that? So I'm going to try to focus mostly on that, and I'm going to try to leave plenty of time for questions because maybe even the things that you're interested in have nothing to do with what I'm going to tell you and I want to make sure that there's a chance for other topics that might be related to land use development or community development to be talked about during my time slot. In a real brief overview I'm going to talk about observations that I've made while I've been working out in Western North Dakota for the last couple of years about impacts. Practices that we commonly see and resource needs that I think are really evident. And then I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about some concepts. Maybe most of those things are tools and I'm going to use some terms that may not be familiar to you that I'd like to start to put into your mind and talking just a little bit about some procedures and maybe even some warnings about what to try to avoid doing when you're dealing with land use and community growth. So just to go back and talk again about what we had observed, trucks everywhere. Speeding, slow filling, stopping, more than I could have ever imagined. I grew up on a farm and great story about what you used to see going to town maybe you passed one neighbor and that's it. That's what I'm used to seeing. It's not what I see when I'm working out here now. And housing, just a couple of issues, lots of people that I don't think if they're from 35 other states really get used to the idea of North Dakota winters. It's not how I spend my winters living in a camp or trying to make sure things to get through the winter because I have no place else to live. So as a community or a county, the issue of housing is really critical and I think Greg spent a little bit of time and maybe the presentation that Kathy did beforehand also spent a little bit of time talking about how the housing market changes. I'm going to skip all the rest of that stuff that I could talk about and just move on to ask you to think with me about how people make decisions in your community. First of all, if you have a land use decision to be made, how many of you typically make it a year? The numbers I have here represent the numbers that Dunn County made just a year or two ago. Less than 20 decisions a year, they've had four times a year to make those less than 20 decisions. This past year, they were meeting every month and they were averaging over 20 decisions per month. Orders and magnitude of growth, opportunities of growth decisions that need to be made and are still going to be needed, probably even greater numbers is coming in. So let's go back and think about how you make decisions again. Most of the time, what you're used to thinking and doing is basically the hands-on approach. You know, you make an agreement, you know what you have in mind, you think you both understand the same thing and that's good enough for you. In this new situation, that's not good enough. We need to be crossing all the eyes and dotting all the T's, making sure that everything's in black and white. Many of your communities probably have zoning regulations. Some people may think you have zoning regulations and come to find out that they were never really formally adopted. In order to have an ordinance that's going to work for you in the coming month, years, as development approaches, you probably need to dust off the ordinance and find out what it really says and what it's good for in terms of addressing the issues that Greg's been talking about this morning. Thinking about decision-making again. How do you usually make decisions? You don't have a lot of them coming up at the same time. Sometimes you look at them case by case and you just do what you think is best. If you've got 20 of them to be made every month, there's all kinds of room for inconsistency and creep in. So one of the things you probably want to do is make sure you start developing checklists and some guidelines that are going to make sure you are consistent. You do make decisions based on similar requests. And then I think a lot of times we're used to being very informal about our minutes and documentation. So you may make a decision and at the time you do why you made it. But five years down the road, does anybody else know why you made it? If you ever end up in a court, only the information that's been documented in your decision meetings are going to be able to be used in court. So document, document everything. Say again? And date it. And date it, yes. Just some questions. When you start thinking about what your community might need and you're starting to think about potential for growth, ask these questions. What can our infrastructure support? If this proposition or proposal gets added to our community, what will we have available after it's in place? Can we serve for more? Or are we going to be running out of water? Or sewer treatment capacity? Will there be any open lots available for somebody to build a house on? But it's not just their capacity, it's also the question of are we making sure that those kinds of potential growth developments are happening in the best spot? One of the things that's most frustrating to me is to see where a community's basically made a decision that closes the door on future growth opportunities. Maybe they figured, well, nobody's going to move this direction so we're just going to have a cul-de-sac out here and we'll build houses all the way around it and you can't expand that street without tearing out a house or two. And then are we allowing an opportunity for future growth in other ways? Not just roads, but just in terms of capacity. You know if we're going to have to spend some money on a sewer system upgrade and the replacement is a six-inch pipe but the direction that the sewer system couldn't be going suggests there could be a lot more housing or development out there maybe we should upgrade that pipe to eight inches. Then how can we use this built-in launcher? This is one of the things that I've been encouraging all the communities I've been working in to do. Yes, there's some negatives, yes there's some positives but ultimately the oil, at least development phase is going to lead you and you're going to be left with the production phase which is going to be a lower level of activity but it's also going to lead you with the more permanent level of activity in your community. So what do you do to build for that level of development that's going to serve your community well? Can you take advantage of the fact that you have to do some upgrades to streets with sewer water so that they're paid for for the next 50 or 60 years? So I mentioned that I wanted to spend most of my time talking about tools and things that we might be able to do to help address the impacts that we were talking about earlier today and each of these in my mind are a tool and I'm going to get into them a little bit more detail later on so I'm going to talk about it now but think about the fact that you don't just have zoning regulations you don't just have plans that you need but you need to think about what your community's vision for itself is a zoning ordinance is really supposed to be a set of rules that help to maintain the values of your community and that's kind of a strange way of thinking about it that's more often thought about as the plan but the plan really is the embodiment of the ideas that you want to have your community grow into its policies and so on and the rules on what the ordinances are there to help make the policies happen. I'm going to try and move quickly here one of the things I started noticing is that in the whole country people want everything done yesterday and that's not always in your community your county's best interest taking the time to prepare those tools maybe saying no or at least not yet and I'd like to encourage all of you to not be afraid of saying not yet or no until you have the tools in place to manage the goals that you need and one of the tools I mentioned on the previous page was actually a moratorium if you've been reading the newspapers lately you know that several counties have put in the moratoriums of some things in place and all I've put in the moratorium in place not so long ago but ultimately when you do that what you're doing is you're giving yourself some time to think about the pros and cons instead of just what's right in front of your face where you feel like you have to make a decision immediately I think it's worthwhile pointing out that a lot of times people who are involved in land use management in western North Dakota and small towns in general don't have formal training you can't afford to have somebody who's got a college degree come in and try and run your program for you so you hire people who are intelligent and willing to serve their communities to do one job and when it happens that you start to have some zoning issues you ask somebody who's probably already working for your community to help them with that be sort of the staff person but eventually what happens is you have so much going on that they're overwhelmed and they can't do the two or three jobs that they originally hired to do plus the planning and zoning and then they need to get a better understanding about the technical aspects of doing their job that means you need to be prepared to help them with some training sometimes it's just maybe some written resources but I think a lot of times it's actually going to some seminars to get some detailed training and then finally I just want to make a point about the importance of recognizing that whether it's the ambulance squad, the fire chief, the deputies your county recorder's office or the planning and zoning people all of them are going to see huge upticks in their workload and with that comes the potential for burnout if they're good people you want to keep them so things about how you can try to manage that issue the potential for burnout so I'm going to go ahead and spend a little time talking about some detailed points of land use plan the first thing I want to do is just compare or contrast the difference between zoning and subdivisions and basically zoning regulations have to do with the use of land and subdivision regulations have to do with the division of land or the sale of division of land and there's more to it than that and if you go in and look at the sentry code that I've got listed here for each of the cities, counties and townships what they have to say about zoning these sections of the North Dakota Sentry Code actually provide the authority to your local jurisdictions to do planning and zoning I want to just point out for your information that all three jurisdictions, cities, counties and townships can do zoning but townships don't have the authority to do subdivision control and it's an interesting twist in North Dakota Sentry Code law that both counties and townships can do zoning of the same land so if you have that kind of situational current you might say well, how does that work? and a lot of people scratch their heads and ask well, why in the world are we doing this now? but the thing I want you to just keep in mind is that townships actually have the control if both zoning are in place in the sense that if the township has a regulation that pertains to a particular issue then its regulation is the one that matters whether or not it's more or less stringent than the county regulation let's go back for a second and talk about one other thing I wanted to mention the concept of district if you go in and read the North Dakota Sentry Code and it talks about a city or a county having the authority to do zoning it will refer to the ability to establish zoning districts and essentially a zoning district is an area where you have established a certain set of guidelines that pertain to how that land and that particular geography that area can be used so oftentimes traditionally a zoning district like the agricultural zoning district for areas that are supposed to be reserved for farming, ranching and similar and related uses or you might have a commercial area which is intended to be where most of your retail activities are taking place or a residential area which is essentially supposed to be the place where land is set aside for uses that are related to housing and the idea is that within each district you have to treat all the land the same but you don't have to treat the land that's in a commercial district the same as the land that's in a residential or agricultural district so it's just a basic distinction that's a fundamental principle of what districts do the centric code also talks about a comprehensive plan and if you go in and read it it basically says that if you're going to do zoning it has to be done in accordance with a comprehensive plan and I'm not going to spend much time talking about them today but in a nutshell a plan is that blueprint for growth in your county or your community one of the chief benefits of it is it's a way to make sure that everybody's on the same page in terms of understanding what's expected or intended to happen for growth in your community and that's a good thing everybody likes certainty in order to make decisions for the long term they can feel more comfortable with the investment that they may choose to make if they know what the plan is a comprehensive plan typically has maps it will list goals and policies that are supposed to address how and what you want to see in your community or your county and comprehensive plans aren't static they're not intended to be done once every 20 years or so the idea is that when your circumstances in your local jurisdiction change that it may be time to update your comprehensive plan so the question came up a couple days ago about whether or not you could do revisions to your zoning arguments without updating your comprehensive plan and the basic answer I gave then give again is if what you want to do with your zoning arguments is consistent with what your plan says then you don't have to change the plan but if your circumstances have changed then you maybe want to take a look at changing the plan anyway another tool that's pretty important to think about and you may already do this informally is a capital improvements plan basically what you're doing is you're thinking about whether major investments need to be in your community or your county you're recognized and you don't have the money to do them all at once so you're prioritizing what you're going to spend your money on first it's very useful to be thinking about that not just in terms of what your top priority is but whether or not there's a sequence that can result in the best long-term lease cost or investment and it's also important to recognize that sometimes it makes more sense to do one or two projects at the same time because you can end up with the total cost savings annexation is something that often is an issue when you start to talk about growth in your community and I just want to spend just a tiny bit of time talking about that annexation is a process that has two ways to go about it under the North Dakota Century Code and one of them is by ordinance the other is by resolution thank you who's my helper it wasn't brought with me thank you sir so those two approaches have some benefits depending on what your situation is and if you were paying attention to Dickinson's news over the last year and a half you kind of know the story better than I do maybe but ultimately just I want you to be aware of the fact that you've got some choices there sometimes you might want to choose one or the other in order to do things the cleanest way possible there's a whole section of the Sanctuary Code that deals with that as well extra territorial authorities another term that people talk about bravely your city has a municipal boundary and the area within that is taxed by the city or at least the taxes that are for the city go to the city if it's within that municipal boundary however outside of an extra territory or excuse me outside of the municipal boundaries there is the ability for a city to establish zoning and subdivision control through some of the regulations that the Century Code allows them to have basically the rule is for a community with other 5,000 population you can extend out a half mile and have complete control over the zoning or subdivision authorities in that area and you can together with the county have control over the next half mile so there's a total of about a mile that you can control beyond your municipal boundary the illustration here is for Glenelon and you can see the blue areas for that unilateral control they have for the first half mile and the purple is for the second there's some kind of funky rules about how you determine exactly what the area is you have to draw an arc, it's a half mile and if more than 50% of the land is inside the arc for every quarter quarter section of land that whole quarter quarter goes in and if it's less than 50% the whole quarter quarter stays out Do you say 5,000? If it's 5,000 or under Or under Yeah Just a few other terms and decision processes I just want to alert you to a thing I'll just talk about briefly Plotting review is a process you use for subdivision control and it addresses not just how land should be divided but it's also the time that your community should look at how it will be served by utilities, by roads, etc and there are oftentimes lengthy regulations written for exactly how that's accomplished but just be mindful that that's a process that you should have as a part of your city Zoning amendments take two forms text amendments and map amendments when it's a map amendment it usually deals with a change to a zoning district That oftentimes happens during growth where you have an area that for instance has been zoned agricultural and then there's growth happening and somebody wants to develop some of that agricultural zoned land and it's not allowed so they have to ask for a change in the zoning district to something that would allow Conditional uses, I think I wanted to highlight them just because I think they're a really useful tool for communities to keep in mind Imagine this situation You've got a residential area in your town and there's an area that's been city vacant for quite a while and it's next to some existing housing it's zoned residential and a developer comes along and says you know I think there's a market for multi-family housing here so I want to put up an apartment building here and you don't have any apartment buildings in the area but it seems like a good idea it seems like a good need so you're for the idea but the more you think about it the more you think about the proposal you're recognizing that well they're going to put up 24 living units here and they're not proposing very much parking so that means the parking is going to spill over into the street and it's going to spill over in the street in front of them are neighbors and where are they going to park when they have company and so on and there's going to be some questions that although there's the upside of having the community have that apartment building there may be a downside for the parking issue that comes with it if you have the multi-family function or use in your zoning district for residential as a conditional use it means that you're going to have to hold a hearing on it to consider what the impacts are and then your community is going to have to decide okay what do we need to do to protect those or address those potential impacts and those kinds of things you can call conditions for approval so when you actually end up with an approval of this apartment building you may require that they put 50% or 80% or 100% of their parking needs on the site of the block or the development instead of having an on-street parking for it one other truck that I want to talk about briefly is variances a lot of times I see communities that use variances to do something that well, their regulations don't normally allow them to do and I can't I'm not an attorney, I'm not going to say whether or not that's appropriate but I can tell you that in planning practice it's not a good idea the purpose of a variance is generally to provide the ability of a lot in a particular zoning district to be used the way all the rest of the property in that zoning district is to be used so a variance isn't necessarily a good idea for a use because you don't want to be granting uses to one property that aren't a use that you would allow for every other property in that zoning district if you think about making decisions in the planning and zoning world they follow into three general categories the legislative category the quasi-judicial category and administrative and basically legislative functions really about making rules or policies and that would be something that would mean what happens when you're actually creating a comprehensive plan and establishing your zoning and subdivision regulations quasi-judicial rule is more like what you do when you hold those conditional use hearings then you're acting more like a court and you have to be more careful to make sure that the way you make the decisions follows somewhat court-like procedures and then the last function the administrative function is what's usually the role of a person who's helping staff the planning functions typically a zoning administrator or someone like that and they're oftentimes making decisions or judgments about what applies or doesn't apply according to the ordinance now finally I'm going to talk just a little bit about some issues I think that really come up first of all in zoning one of the fundamental things you want to make sure you're careful not to do is to make arbitrary or precious decisions you're looking for consistency so just keep that in mind being a fundamental thing you want to make sure you are doing when you make those kinds of decisions and then like I mentioned in the beginning this is really important you should keep careful with it personally I think it's to your best interest to actually take record your meetings to let you know exactly what that said and you can refer back to them when you wait the minutes keep in mind that I mentioned this vaguely before but there are certain circumstances for the content of your decisions your minutes are the basis for what can be presented in a court law as evidence to support the decision you've made if somebody wants to contest your decision and then there's a term called ex parte communications which is what I think we do all the time we meet our neighbors and we talk about the issues but when you have a decision that needs to be made in a zoning or a subdivision control context and you're going to be having a planning commission on city council meeting or county board of commissioners meeting about that topic the place to talk about that the place to present information that should be used in making those decisions is in that meeting and talking about that with one of those decision makers outside that context is not a good idea there could be lots of other things I could bring up but I told you I was going to try and keep this short and give you an opportunity to ask me questions or ask us questions about what's on your mind so with that I'm just going to turn it over for you to question me and if you have those if you don't want to speak up and you've got those cards you want to have any questions that they bring smart group yes sir board and speed would play their part in this conference what's back up just a second and talk about what FEMA does that relates to counties in terms of administrative functions or regulations if you have planned that FEMA has designated to be in within a 100 year floodplain within your jurisdiction whether it's a county or a city you have the situation where you will end up having to participate in the national flood insurance program and as a local governing body participating in the national flood insurance program you basically promise that you will regulate the use of land within that 100 year floodplain I'm oversimplifying things but in a nutshell that's the starting point to think about so if you're a participant of the program you need to make sure that you're following what they say you promised them at that time and typically that includes a set of regulations that are not very long but they get forgotten a lot and they include things like if there's a flood a floodway which is the area that's supposed to be reserved for flood waters to run through the area then that floodway should not have any development happening in it and there's the area outside of the floodway that's still in the 100 year floodplain where development is allowed but only if it's built to certain standards so the local jurisdiction that makes that promise to regulate areas within the floodplain is responsible for doing that typically you do it as part of your planning and zoning procedures because what happens you're talking about development if you have a zoning ordinance it's likely that you're going to the zoning administrator and saying well can I do this and the zoning administrator should be thinking oh well that's in 100 year floodplain in addition to our regular zoning regulations you also have to meet the requirements of this special floodplain regulation what other question have you ever run into a situation where there's no wetlands within that county no does that also have to be designated FEMA doesn't doesn't try to designate or require the management of wetlands or the maintenance of wetlands okay we have a question here if both city and other county zone the same area who has the last word on decisions or has the most authority I'm going to back up to this one slide and kind of use that as the spring board for the answer because essentially a city and a county don't normally have the ability to do zoning up the same area within a city's municipal boundary the county has no ability to zone and we wouldn't complicate things and talk about joint powers agreements at another time but in general that's the way it is if the county has zoning it doesn't apply inside the municipal boundary outside the municipal boundary if a city chooses to establish extra territorial zoning authority for that first half mile they can do so without any regard to what the county says in other words the county doesn't have any say over what those rules are they may have some comments they want to make but I think it's fair to say that there's unilateral control there for that second half mile if the city chooses to establish extra territorial authority that goes beyond the first half mile they have to do so jointly with the county and in that case you might that might be what this question applies specifically to if there's not agreement there is no decision and by default the decision is no if there's an application that's my understanding I would advise you to get a second opinion from an attorney because I'm not intending to practice law by giving an answer to that question sir one step further the township has no authority no original authority township has authority for zoning everything else established one thing that's sometimes not recognized is that you don't automatically have zoning authority you actually have to establish a zoning authority over a particular chunk of land before you can see you have authority over it so townships may say okay we're writing this zoning ordinance and it's not supplying to all the land within our township well that's true except if there's a municipality that has some of the land within that township because if that's the case township has no say about the land inside the municipal boundary and by the same token the township has no say or the land outside the municipal boundary if it's within the extra territorial area there was another hand raised anybody here who has grown from everything just say it one more time your boundaries you drew let's say it expands the city gets to that the first blue square how when do those boundaries change great question did you hear that when do the boundaries change if the city's municipal boundary changes the corollary question is does the extra territorial boundary change automatically and the answer is no you have to as a municipality take the formal procedure of expanding that extra territorial area and so if you expand your let's just say in this case if I suppose I said there was a red light here can you see the red dot okay so let's just say that Glenn Allen grows all up this way okay new residential housing development right next to the golf course well that means that instead of measuring with that half mile arc you can see where it's already kind of making that arc because this sticks out about that quarter line or section line I mean if it was all the way up here that arc would be more up in here but you don't get the blue extension unless you pass an ordinance you're now taking authority over that other questions great question do your taxes change if the zoning changes that's pretty much what you're saying right that's a separate question from do your taxes change if you move from being in the township in the county to in the city your taxes are going to be based on whether you're in the city or the county but with regard to the zoning change taxing is based on use of land and not on the zoning of the land so let's say you change from agricultural zone to a commercial zone until you start developing the land you won't see the taxes change first of all I haven't done any detailed research into illegal ramifications but years ago I worked for a county where gravel mining was a common practice and the issues that got the most attention and most negative attention were those applications for opening a new gravel mine and the reason why was the same kind of issue that Greg was talking about earlier today gravel trucks are notorious for ignoring every rule you can think of and it's the trucks about the people driving them that do that but in addition to that there's that side factor that if you're out in the country most of those roads aren't paved roads and so what do you get? dust lots and lots of dust so there's safety issues and then there's just the whole quality of life I heard so many times I spent mine and then pick a number out of your head to buy this tract of land and move out of the country so that I can have a peaceful surrounding and now some things you don't in this case the short end of the story is that they as accounting would determine exactly what haul roads could be used so they would say yes this is the conditional use we will allow you to open this gravel mining operation but if you're going to do it you're going to be on this road for this chunk of it and then this road and so on they would also sometimes put limits on to take place not 24 hours a day but doing down and down so something like that I think that that's a type of tool that you can use pretty broadly whether or not you can charge a fee is something that I don't want to try to answer Rod, have you investigated that question? we've got Rod Label with the Roosevelt Custer Regional Authority here we're asking a question about the ability to charge a fee for a haul road sorry for putting you on the spot but Rod's been out here for a long time and the issue's been around for a long time so okay, any other questions? did I get to your question, sir? well what I was wondering is really are there required to have a haul road to use your road or is that just kind of a bum if they're on a public road you can you can set a condition like that in my opinion and again, it might be wise to consult an attorney to try to make sure that you've got the teeth behind the request you're going to make