Officials in Burlington have decided to defuse some potential new rules for shooting ranges that had set off a minor firestorm when they debuted before the city’s planning commission last month.
Burlington’s city council ultimately dropped these provisions from a slate of proposed changes to the city’s development rules at the behest of a Chad Meadows, a consultant who has helped the city fine tune its unified development ordinance since its adoption.
Meadows, who presented these prospective amendments on Monday, conceded that the city’s planning staff had originally pitched the proposed shooting range standards as part of a plan to allow these venues to set up shop within Burlington’s municipal limits.
“Your current city code does not permit commercial gun range facilities,” the consultant added during the city council’s latest monthly work session on Monday, “and the standards that we proposed were fairly strict and fairly rigorous.”
Jamie Lawson, the city’s planning director, acknowledged that she said she and her colleagues had floated these standards after they received inquiries from residents about whether shooting ranges are even permitted in Burlington.
Meadows added, for his part, that these prospective provisions were shot full of holes when they went before Burlington’s planning and zoning commission in March. The consultant went on to concede that, regardless of whether any of these proposed standards are retained in the long run, the city must first revise its municipal code to strike the current prohibition on commercial gun ranges. In the meantime, he said that this code amendment would buy the city’s planning staff some time to refine its original standards for shooting ranges.
“We would recommend that you not include this [in the latest list of proposed changes to the unified development ordinance] so that staff go back and work with the entities who are calling for this.”
Still loaded with revisions
The council nevertheless agreed to proceed with nearly four dozen other revisions that Meadows and his staff-level counterparts have proposed to Burlington’s unified development ordinance.
Meadows informed the council that this list of potential amendments is the fifteenth he has trotted out since the council adopted the unified development ordinance in 2019.
The consultant noted that the latest batch of proposed changes includes more generous height limits on outdoor lights at industrial facilities and the potential use of landscaping to conceal the “unfinished” side of a fence that faces the roadway. Meadows also suggested that the city forbid “moving signs” on parked cars, which he said some businesses have employed to skirt a municipal ban on advertising banners, wind puppets, and the like.
State of anxiety
Meadows added, however, that the “vast majority” of his latest amendments are meant to bring the city’s ordinance in line with new “session laws” promulgated by North Carolina’s General Assembly.
Among other things, these new statewide provisions prevent local governments from departing from the state’s fire code, allow farms to put up signs in the road right-of-way during “farm season,” and permit battery-powered electric fences – although local officials can still require a non-volatile perimeter fence outside this electrical barrier.
Meadows also called the council’s attention to two other session laws that he found particularly problematic from the city’s perspective. One of these new mandates preempts any locality from exceeding the state transportation department’s standards for driveways and parking areas. Another lays out new protocols for “performance guarantees,” or financial sureties that some localities require developers to provide for things like stormwater collection and erosion controls.
Particularly disconcerting for the consultant was a new provision that allows developers to enlist their own experts to overrule a local government inspector on whether a particular performance guarantee has been met.
“The applicant may choose to bring in a separate, private professional engineer,” he went on to explain, “who, if they stamp or seal [a statement] that whatever feature was completed in conformance with city standards, you must accept it.”
Meadows admitted that the contractor who signs off on the performance requirement would assume the legal liability that currently belongs to the city. He nevertheless warned that, if those contractors go belly up, the city could be left with substandard structures that are, in effect, “ticking time bombs” whose failure would rebound entirely on city officials.
“And that’s one of the central problems with privatizing the responsibility for building inspections,” he added.
Meadows went on to profess that this deference to private interests is becoming more and more typical of the General Assembly’s approach to growth and development.
“There is a growing appetite on Jones Street for increased privatization and decreased local government autonomy,” he said. “And my friends – this is only the beginning of where we’re going.”
Meadows went on to recall that other proposals making their way through the General Assembly would further limit ability of local development standards to exceed state-level requirements. He also alluded to one gambit to make elected officials personally liable for development decisions made in a spirit of “malfeasance.”
The consultant’s heads-up proved especially troubling for Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler, who insisted that the city’s elected leaders ought to be informed of instances in which the new session laws are employed.
“This is going to get exploited,” Butler told the rest of the council. “If this happens…I want to know about it, because I’m going to get in the car and drive to Raleigh.”
Butler went on to suggest that the council should register a formal objection to the new regulatory trend within the General Assembly. At his suggestion, the council agreed to dispatch a formal letter to the city’s legislative delegation.
