The Summit County Council will continue to work on revising the code for accessory buildings in the Snyderville Basin.
But on Wednesday, the council voted to change the moratorium that’s currently in place for those structures.
The council, by a 4 to 1 vote, changed its temporary zoning ordinance so it would exempt accessory structures of 5,000 square feet or less.
Councilor Chris Robinson noted that the moratorium was enacted in March and runs until September 10th.
“It was a shotgun approach. There were some unintended consequences where relatively small projects that had been in various stages of the pipeline but hadn’t been vested were basically being prohibited from moving forward. And so we thought, at least the majority of us thought that 5,000 feet and below is a threshold that’s not gonna cause any harm. And it will do a lot of good to those who want to take advantage of this building season and build a relatively modest building.”
Councilor Doug Clyde also thanked the planning staff for making the change.
“This is a lot of whipsawing, as it were, to get around to figuring out how to ultimately control this,” he said. “But I think that staff has presented us with a number that is reasonable to go forward on, and will largely eliminate most of the conflicts that we’ve created by this TZO and give us a little more time and a little more comfort to work on the bigger buildings and the uses associated with them which represent our major target.”
The dissenting vote was cast by Roger Armstrong. He said in a statement to KPCW News that if the change was meant to help people wanting to build items like garages this season, 5,000 square feet seemed too large to address the problem.
“I would have accepted 3,000 or even 3,500 square feet, but 5,000 square feet is a very impressive garage,” he said.
