After about a year of consideration, the Gettysburg Planning Commission voted unanimously to advance their recommendations for the repeal and rewrite of the borough’s zoning code.
The Borough Council will take up the project at their workshop at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 27, beginning the third and final phase of the rewrite project.
The Council will have the ultimate say over the content of the code.
The public will have more opportunities to comment at Council meetings, and a formal public hearing will be held before the final vote.
The Council will also need to submit the draft zoning code to Adams County Planning Commission for their recommendations before the public hearing.
In phase one of the rezoning project, an ad hoc committee — made up of citizens, staff, and two Planning Commission members — worked in closed meetings with a professional consultant for approximately 10 months to create an initial draft. They first met on April 18, 2023.
Planning Commission Chair Charles Strauss began the special meeting held Monday May 5 with a review of the history of the rewrite project and the state code that governs the process.
He also stated, “Over the last months, most of the work has been attending to comments brought to us by the community . . . [They] were, yes, mostly motivated by their own personal properties and their own personal ways of navigating this borough, but in some cases representing others, and then some, just for the common interest and the common good, wanted to share things that they thought belonged in it and wanted this planning commission to hear it. So we delayed in passing our resolution until we were certain that we maximized the amount of community input. And that’s where we are today.”
He thanked those who have been involved in the rewrite project so far and those who will be involved in the future.
Some explanatory materials from the Planning Commission will be presented to Borough Council alongside the draft. Strauss said he planned to attend the Council’s work sessions as much as possible to answer questions if needed.
Strauss said the impetus to begin Gettysburg’s rezoning was the completion of the Central Adams Joint Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 2019.
The document strives to set shared planning goals for Cumberland Township, Straban Township, and Gettysburg Borough. For example, a section titled “Future Land Use Plan,” lays out recommendations “to establish board policy guidance to achieve the desired land use of the region.”
The last substantive revision of the Borough’s zoning code was in 2008, Strauss stated.
The draft that the Planning Commission voted to recommend Monday is posted in full on the Gettysburg Borough website.
The meetings have been filmed by the Community Media Center of South Central PA thanks to funding privately raised by the community, and can be viewed at their website.
Catalina Righter, freelance reporter, lives in New Oxford. She previously wrote for the Carroll County Times and the Kent County News, covering crime, education, local government and arts. She works as a legal assistant.