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Murphy – Cherokee County could be on the cusp of establishing its first planning committee.
Commissioner Jan Griggs brought up the issue and even made a motion to establish such a group during the board’s March 21 meeting. Chair Dan Eichenbaum said he would prefer to wait and address the issue during the upcoming Monday meeting, after County Manager Randy Wiggins has been given a chance to provide the board with more information.
“From what I understood at that meeting, maybe the interest is to get that group together to start investigating options for land-use planning in Cherokee County,” Wiggins said. “Just to start investigating that topic in and of itself, what types of things might the county want to be looking at in terms of any type of land-use planning.”
County attorney Darryl Brown opened the door to the issue during a Jan. 24 public hearing in which he recommended against the county adopting a noise ordinance – a proposed solution to noise from unenclosed crypto mining operations – and instead raised the possibility of a land use ordinance. Brown said March 21 that a land use ordinance would first need to pass through a planning committee that has been authorized by the commissioners.
“We need to have one,” Griggs said. “We have a future that we need to start planning, and we need to start having a planning committee now, get one formed.”
Griggs added that a planning committee does not have authorization to enact ordinances on its own. Instead, the group makes plans that have to be approved by the board of commissioners.
Neighboring Clay County resurrected its planning board, which had been dormant for years, in June 2020. The now five-member group, which at one time consisted of nine members, is intended to oversee a variety of land use ordinances in that county.
“It’s kind of going to be the gatekeeper for all these other land use types of ordinances that we’ve already had,” Clay County attorney Merinda Woody said at the time.
Wiggins said a potential Cherokee County planning committee would likely fall in the same five-to-nine member range. Clay County’s board also included individuals from a variety of professional sectors, including real estate, banking and agriculture, a makeup that likewise makes sense to Wiggins.
“All we’ll be doing at the next meeting is providing the board with some information to help them determine how they want to constitute this board,” Wiggins said.
“How many members, how long of terms, do they want staggered terms, what kind of directives they want to provide ... and then what do we want them working on. I think they want a good, well-rounded group of people on there to bring different perspectives to whatever the issue may be that the community is addressing.”
Wiggins said the closest thing the county ever had to a planning committee was the Cherokee County Tomorrow Committee, a group of local individuals who worked for two years on a long-term comprehensive county plan.
The board of commissioners voted 4-1 to accept the plan presented to them by the committee in January 2016, but they declined to provide any input or promise to implement any of its suggestions. Commissioner Cal Stiles said at the time he wanted to hold a work session with the committee to discuss the contents of the plan.
Instead, Eichenbaum made a different motion in the form of a typed statement, thanking everyone for the hard work while simultaneously dissolving the committee. Eichenbaum’s motion also accepted the plan as a “research and reference tool only” and gave “no consent or approval in any way for the implementation of any portion of this plan, its goals or its objectives.”
Stiles said Monday that while his detractors sometimes accuse him of supporting zoning, there is a clear distinction between planning and zoning.
“I don’t support zoning,” Stiles said. “I do support planning, and I think there is a line drawn between the two.”