Cheney to review zoning chapter despite codifier's errors

The city of Cheney is inviting public comment on its notice of application making changes to the city’s municipal code chapter Title 21 — Zoning while also moving forward with the public hearing process.

The comment period, which runs through Jan. 21, is required because the original draft that came back from the city’s third-party codifiers contained errors and inadvertent omissions, the result of boiling 156 pages of comments and changes into a 36-page document.

“They just goofed up on some things,” city planner Brett Lucas said. “When you’re doing something this big, it’s inevitable.”

Most of the changes are typos, what Lucas called “Scribner’s errors” although in some cases the errors are omitted items from lists and inclusion of information in the wrong subsections.

“Things we should have caught earlier,” Lucas said.

For instance, a note allowing manufacturing/production to take place in conjunction with a retail or restaurant/food service use was omitted from a table listing uses in the Commercial C-2 zone. In another case, a note allowing owners of adjacent properties the opportunity to consolidate their perimeter screen plantings along shared boundaries, instead of each owner providing a 5-foot-wide planting strip, was included in two different charts in different sections instead of just one.

Definitions of landscaping types, screening, see-through buffer and open area landscaping, were also double listed.

According to the published notice, review of the corrected chapter is scheduled to come before the city’s Planning Commission for a public hearing at its Feb. 9 meeting. That could change, however, with city officials considering holding the public hearing during the City Council’s final meeting in January, scheduled for Jan. 27.

“We can’t make a decision until after the comment period anyway,” Lucas said.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].

Author Bio

John McCallum, Retired editor

John McCallum is an award-winning journalist who retired from Cheney Free Press after more than 20 years. He received 10 Washington Newspaper Publisher Association awards for journalism and photography, including first place awards for Best Investigative, Best News and back-to-back awards in Best Breaking News categories.

 

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