At its Thursday, Aug. 4 meeting at City Hall, the Sweet Home Planning Commission approved an updated Sweet Home Development Code that commissioners have been working on for several years.
The code will now be sent to the Sweet Home City Council for final approval.
“We really started this years ago, but we changed planners, and everytime we changed the planner, things went back to square one,” said Planning Commissioner Eva Jurney. She said the most recent iteration of the commission’s efforts to update the code started about a year ago.
The Keizer-based MorganCPS Group aided the planning commission in completing the updated code.
The commission went through the code line by line, opting to meet twice a month as opposed to the group’s typical monthly meeting to get through it all faster.
MorganCPS Group Principal Planner Walt Wendolowski made a final presentation summarizing the changes that were made to the city’s development code at the Aug. 4 meeting.
“The meeting we had last week was the culmination of all the work that (Wendolowski) had done for us, and all the times that he attended our meetings via Zoom so we could go over the things that we were concerned about,” Jurney said.
“It was the whole nine yards,” Jurney said of the update.
“It was completely looking at it from A to Z and making lots of changes. There was a lot of content that was relevant to now that could not have been relevant 10 years ago, that was really important content.”
“There was dedication from all of the planning commissioners, and it was done with a lot of thought and concern about Sweet Home’s future,” Jurney added.
“This is about Sweet Home’s future, not just fixing things that didn’t work in the past. It’s about creating a document that will benefit future residents of the city.”