What's the Plan Say?

Zoning Board members serve an important function in our community. They spend hours reviewing documents for a meeting hoping to improve their community and they will still make someone mad. The decisions these people make are not life and death, but they can affect the quality of life and property values.
The City recently completed a comprehensive plan that we are now trying to role into the zoning code so that it will implement the plans. The idea is that the plan and the code have to be consistent by state statute. Writing comprehensive plans provides all these cool concepts for changing the community. The code actually sets rules for making it happen – reality sets in. The rules that then need to be enforced to achieve the cool concepts tend to seem intrusive. Intrusions that seem unnecessary to the average individual who would meet most zoning requirements even without zoning. Still, that one exception to the average always set the benchmark.
Zoning Codes often are intrusions into the preferences of property owners in the way they use their property. The practical issues involve the type and specificity of the code and the application by staff, commissioners and council members. For the code to work effectively and fairly, the code needs to be consistent with the plan which was written to provide a clear view of the objective. Codes that place to great a range of interpretation in the hands of the implementing authority may end up not being reasonable and undermining the confidence of the community.
The enforcing authorities need to have options for the potential solutions to the all the problems that will eventual develop. The city also needs to remain consistent with the plan and provide codes that will achieve the stated desired results. This may seem overzealous to plan commissioners and the public, but we already have complaints regarding the same codes issues that are causing some code rewrite consternation.
The consistency of the plan and the code should help reduce personal biases and arbitrary decisions by staff, the plan commission and the council.