The City of Lewes will explore putting the brakes on new subdivisions in the city, possibly for more than a year.
The possibility of a moratorium on new major subdivisions - those with more than five units - comes from a recommendation from the city’s Planning Commission, which discussed the issue in detail and called on the mayor and council to institute a pause, citing concerns about SB 23. That measure, passed by state lawmakers earlier this summer is designed to jumpstart the construction of affordable housing, but local governments have criticized it for eliminating public hearings on new subdivisions and prohibiting localities from placing conditions on subdivisions which meet the city’s code specifications.
Wrestling with those provisions, Lewes’s planning commission sent a letter to mayor and council last month, calling for a pause on new subdivisions, until the city can beef up its requirements in its comprehensive plan. At a meeting last week, Planning Commission Chair Rich Innes told the city council that the current comprehensive plan, which is due for an update, is too vague to exert the kind of control the city needs over future development.
“What we are being tasked with now, given new state laws, is to be very specific - to have objective standards in the new comprehensive plan,” he explained.
While there are no major subdivision projects currently in the planning pipeline, Councilman Tim Ritzert said he saw the pause and the comprehensive plan changes as a necessary measure.
“It is a safeguard for this city, this is the way I look at it. On the chance that some applicant came forward tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now,” he said.
Innes told council members that the moratorium the Planning Commission is suggesting has a definitive end date - upon state acceptance of the updated comprehensive plan or December 31, 2027, whichever comes first, and it applies only to new major subdivision proposals.
“That makes it legally defensible,” Innes said. “If it's open-ended, if it seems to be arbitrary, then we're going to be subject to challenge, and we may be challenged on this, let's be frank about it.”
While the comprehensive plan is expected to be ready for submission to the state in about a year, some council members suggested that the completion date should be moved up to February of next year. That was a non-starter for the planning commission's Kevin Keane, who stressed the need for extensive public comment before working on a new comprehensive plan..
“If you had come to us, or somebody had come to us and said, last summer, okay, we want to accelerate it until February of 27, we could have done it, Keane said. “We could have planned it out and mapped it out. But where we are now, we can't do it. It's just impossible.”
Council members seemed broadly supportive of the moratorium as suggested by the planning commission. The next step is a public hearing on the matter, scheduled for October 7.
