PITTSBORO — A few months after dismissing the firm previously hired to begin work on the county’s Unified Development Ordinance, Chatham County government has restarted its efforts to put together governing rules for development.
The county’s board of commissioners voted unanimously last week to enact a “hybrid” approach to the UDO process — hiring one firm to host public meetings and incorporate the feedback into the plan, and another firm to write the actual code.
The vote came after a recommendation from the Chatham County Planning Department, whose director, Jason Sullivan, presented the item to the board.
“A lot of jurisdictions might have typically had one or two community meetings,” Sullivan said. “We know in the county that there’s a wide range of interest and not everything was addressed in full detail in the Comprehensive Plan. We are trying to address as many things as possible so at the end we have a successful Unified Development Ordinance.”
When the commissioners approved the Chatham County Comprehensive Plan in 2017, the UDO was the next step. The county had hired Durham-based CodeWright Planners to write the plan, but ran into issues with the firm. Chatham County Manager Dan LaMontagne told the News + Record in November that county staff liked CodeWright, but the firm began extending deadlines and was not meeting expectations in the contract. The county paid out $7,000 of a $388,000 contract before the relationship was terminated.
On the second go-round, the county and planning department are not planning any changes to what was asked the second time around, but will take a different approach. Sullivan said staff was considering doing the process itself — other jurisdictions have done things the same way in recent years.
“Although you may end up with a solid project at the end, you typically end up with lengthy delays,” he said. “You kind of get into a cycle you can’t get out of, and a three- or four-year process can draw out to six or seven years.”
County staff has been drafting requests for proposals that will be available “maybe within a month,” Sullivan said. The work already done by the former firm would likely be discarded in favor of a “fresh start,” he added.
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.