Consultant Outlines Zoning, Land-Use Planning in Anderson County
Greg Wilson/Anderson County
As rapid growth and questions about how to regulate development continue to be in the front of many people’s minds, one land use/zoning challenge is unique to Anderson County.
Anderson is the only county in the United States that utilizes voting precincts to determine land use zoning boundaries. Because voting precincts are drawn based on population density for political representation—and must be reapportioned after every census—tying land-use regulations to these political lines creates a logistical challenge.
The county currently relies on an "opt-in" model where residents of individual voting precincts must petition and vote to enact zoning, resulting in a patchwork map where regulated neighborhoods often sit immediately adjacent to unzoned land.
But county council is seeking to at least address the issue of land use as the county finds itself in the early, architectural phase of rewriting its foundational land-use rules, a massive undertaking that will likely remain a work in progress for some time.
Chad Meadows, the principal of CodeWright Planners, a consultant hired last year by the county to find solutions, on Monday offered a public meeting at the Anderson Civic Center outlining the issue, with a timeline aiming for the new land use and development ordinance—or LUDO, in the alphabet soup of municipal planning. While potential implementation of the final plan is roughly a year away from reaching a stage where elected officials could even consider adopting it, citizen suggestions are still being factored into the document.
Meadows described the current state as a tedious reality as a "code diagnosis" phase. This involves a forensic review of the county’s existing development regulations, which he characterized as an aging rulebook drafted in the 1980s and 1990s for local conditions that simply no longer exist. Meadows said Anderson County currently is attempting to use "yesterday's development rules" to answer the modern growth problems of today. In the first step toward correcting this, the county recently completed a comprehensive plan, which is serving as the philosophical policy guide for the new ordinance.
That comprehensive plan provides the necessary framework for approximately 60 new recommendations aimed at modernizing the county's development regulations. The goal, Meadows said, is to protect the community's character, improve street safety, elevate the quality of development, and better protect the surrounding environment. The immediate next step is the creation of what planners call an annotated outline—essentially a blueprint laying out the major sections and topics—before the county can begin drafting the actual standards. The process is deliberate by design, an intentional effort to avoid rushing a document that will fundamentally shape the county's physical development for years to come.
Meanwhile, the public has not been quiet. Meadows reported that the county has already received substantial and constructive input from residents. Citizens have consistently raised concerns regarding the preservation of the area's agricultural heritage, the management of rapid regional growth, and the urgent need to rethink a rezoning process that many currently find incredibly difficult to navigate.
In a rare triumph for bureaucratic empathy, a central goal of this sweeping rewrite is plain readability. The county wants the new ordinance to be understandable to average citizens who do not possess formal legal or planning training.
To that end, Meadows pointed to the first pages of the code diagnosis, which summarize the recommendations in plain English. While the working draft itself runs a dense 120 pages, planners hope that residents will focus first on this summary and provide feedback on whether the language is clear enough. If it remains opaque, Meadows saod that the public should explicitly say so, insisting that the final document must be written for the actual audience that will be forced to use it.
