By Dawn De Busk

Staff Writer

NAPLES — The Town of Naples is making its Land Use Ordinance more user friendly.

Now, the project is a few steps away from its first public hearing.

Making the Land-UseOrdinancemore ‘user friendly’ means it will be easier for people to find the ordinance in one spot, according to Naples Code Enforcement Officer (CEO) Renee Carter. 

“We are working on reformatting the current Land-use Ordinance so that it is user friendly. We are pulling all the ordinances together in one place,” Carter said.

She stressed that this process does not change the meaning of any ordinance.

“We are not changing any addressed allowance in a zone,” she said, saying except for solar energy which was never an addressed allowance until last summer.

The town is reformatting the Land Use Ordinance, Carter repeated. 

The new format, the proposed Land-Use Ordinance, requires the approval of the voting residents at Annual Town Meeting, Carter said. 

For the committee members involved in reviewing the land use ordinance — it has meant a lot of elbow grease. For the about past six months, the Naples Ordinance Review Committee (ORC) has been working with the town planner to organize Land Use Ordinances so that people can more easily find what they are seeking, Carter said. 

“What is happening is that our contract Planner Ben Smith and his assistant Sarah” DelGizzo, both of North Star Planning, are putting together what we’ve talked about. We are hoping this one last piece will go into place so that we can do a public hearing,” Carter said. 

The town is aiming for a public hearing in mid-February and March, she said.

“The more we let people know about the public hearing, the more likely we’ll get someone there— either by Zoom or in-person,” she said.

The ORC will hold its next meeting in late January. The time and date are not on the town’s website yet.

The ORC has been working under the deadline of trying to have the reformatted Land Use Ordinance done in time for annual town meeting, which could be held in April.

Also, the committee has been reviewing the Solar Energy Ordinance, she said. Additionally, it will be looking at the town’s marijuana moratorium, which was passed by the selectmen a few months ago.

“The ORC looks at all of this stuff before it goes to the town,” she said.  

“We already have the solar ordinance. We voted on it last year. We are tweaking it so it could go in better zone. They are deciding where solar energy projects can go and the language,” Carter said. 

“In land use, if it is not spelled out specifically, if it doesn’t say it is permitted, it is automatically prohibited. If it is not permitted, you cannot do it. That is land use 101,” Carter said. 

If the town does not say where solar energy projects could possibly go, those sites would be off limits to solar energy developers.