The Weathersfield Planning Commission met on October 6, 2025, at 6:31 PM. The meeting focused on the adoption of several town plan chapters, including the mission statement, natural scenic and historic resources, and flood resiliency. Extensive discussion also occurred on the land use chapter and future land use maps, pending further review. The board also reviewed permit data from the past two fiscal years. Note: The transcript references September dates, but the meeting date as provided is October 6, 2025. This discrepancy is not fully explained.
I just ate your other here. Yeah. Let me let me get my phone shut off. Okay, it's off. All right. All right. Well, the time is six thirty-one. I'm going to go ahead and call it meetings of order. Thank you, everyone, for coming out to the September 15th planning commission meeting. Um nothing really on the agenda to review. Any of the other uh board members want to move anything around. Hearing nothing, moving on to comments from the chair and land use administrator. I have no comments at the time, Brian. Do you um one thing is uh to follow up on the interim. And and there are rules that say you can't change your zoning bylaws. Um, and this addresses interim zoning bylaws. Uh so I'm gonna read this into the record. Uh hi, Ryan. This is one of the many gray areas in municipal land use planning, but my read is that yes, you can so long as the town meets the pre prerequisite set forth in section four four one five section A. Quote, if a miss a municipality is conducting or has taken action to conduct studies or has held or is holding a hearing for the purpose of considering a bylaw, a comprehensive plan or an amendment, extension or an addition to a bylaw or plan, unquote. In addition, I agree that the planning commission and select board uh would want to include some explanation and basis for why the interim bylaws are necessary to quote protect the public health, safety, and general welfare, and provide for orderly physical and economic growth, unquote. But I think that threshold could be pretty easily met. I agree with Susan that the prohibition on amending bylaws when the town plan has expired. The town plan expires is for traditional zoning and subdivision bylaws, not interim bylaws, parentheses, which are expressly meant as an interim emergency measure, unparenthes, period. Interim bylaws can only last for two years with one year extension and can be repealed by a vote of the public. So there are limitations on them. If the town is already moving forward with adopting a new town plan, it would probably be the most practical sense to focus on that and amend the current bylaws once adopted. I also parentheses. Let me know if that helps. So a couple things that we point out here. He asked me what was going on with that, and I told him that exactly what we had done. It didn't rise to an emergency level under our opinion. We had other work to do, and and that we'll wait until we get there. So the interim bylaws are set have been tabled. They're they're done. I also don't see a reason for the process to consider amendment amending bylaws could not start before the enactment of the town plan. Otherwise, you could work on the the bylaws, but you can't you can't move forward with the adoption until the town plan is in place. And I don't know that I don't know how deep you want to do that. I guess if you had sections that were finished, that would be fine. But if you got sections you're working on, I don't know that you'd want to start modifying your bylaws to be finished the town plan. Seeing as how they're the town plan comes first. Um I think uh I I think that about sums that up. Um is that okay, gentlemen? Yeah, I think I was correct when we made that decision at that last meeting. Yes, and yes. So I feel very confident about that. The only other question I have now is where do we get this filed so that when you're gone and we're gone, it's not gone. I have in uh in the land use digital files, um, a folder for regulations that has the zoning bylaws, uh some subdivision regulations and all the iterations of that and stuff like that, um, as well as um state statutes that I've had to reference, and then there's also a folder for um town council opinions. Okay, I I have it saved there. Good.