HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — After years of work, a lot of public comment and listening sessions, members of Holland’s city council unanimously approved the unified development ordinance, or UDO.
Mayor Nathan Bocks talked about the compromise needed to get there, saying what made this overhaul possible is that “we engaged in civil discourse and collaboration and compromise. As I said, this is exactly how this process should work.”
He went on to invite his fellow council members “to implement 54 of the 99 outcome of the 2017 master plan. it’s time to update and to consolidate our decades-old zoning and planning laws that are scattered throughout the city code. It’s time to make it user-friendly,” he said. “Holland is a city that plans.”
Mayor pro tem Mike Trethewey noted that no ordinance could dictate what future councils would decide, but that the current ordinance update, which started more then three years ago, was not rushed.
The changes aren’t random, and they won’t make everyone happy, he noted.
“This is what the people wanted,” he said, adding that the public comment and listening sessions made for long nights and some strange bedfellows, “but this is what democracy is all about … we have to compromise.”
Councilman Dave Hoekstra said zoning can be confusing and some of the changes are being made to made the rules easier to read and understand for residents, whether they are building a house or moving a fence.
He called the experience of updating the complicated ordinance “very weird,” in part because the council could have passed the ordinance as originally proposed and it wouldn’t have much affect on most residents.
But the public retooling process, he said, is “major cheese moving,” at a “unique point in history.” Making sweeping changes to the city’s development ordinance, at a time when the world at large seemed fairly unstable, what with political unrest and a global pandemic, he said, led some people to feel their homes were somehow threatened.
“In 10 years, things may change. There may be another council … the population of this town may change, and we re-evaluate this,” he said.
He gestured to those in the council chambers — city officials and those in audience, noting very few young people were present.
The focus of the council, Hoekstra said, should be on the future, because “we’re doing what we’re doing now to prepare this town for the next generation to take over. To give them something better than we had … to give them a community they feel comfortable in, that they can afford.”
Trethewey, Bocks, Hoekstra and other members of council praised the area residents who showed up to meetings, who wrote letters or emails, or called city officials to express their opinions and thoughts about the changes.
To learn more about the background of the UDO, visit hollandudo.com.
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