A committee reviewing land use policies in Sussex County may be off track as it begins to finalize its report.
Land Use Reform Working Group members were tasked with looking at 17 draft recommendations for county lawmakers at their meeting Thursday.
Consultant John Mullen urged the group to work quickly through the draft recommendations.
“What I really don't want to do, and I'm going to facilitate away from this, this isn't really a time for advocating," he told working group members.
But working group members seemed to have different ideas, spending more than half an hour questioning the consultants about things that didn’t make the draft list.
One concern was the lack of a recommendation to make changes to a recently-passed ordinance that lays out factors that should be considered in approving a subdivision. Staff said they didn’t include that because the ordinance is fairly new.
Members of the working group disagreed, with both builders and environmental advocates saying the ordinance was too vague and needed to be addressed.
Some recommendations sparked little discussion, like several that suggest making it easier to build missing middle housing. The meeting ground to a halt as it approached its third hour with the group only on recommendation number eight. Mullen called it to a halt.
“As I stood here at the beginning of the meeting, laid out kind of certain objectives of where we were going to try to get to, we're clearly not getting to where we had anticipated getting to," he said.
The next meeting of the working group is set for August 5.
