The Nashville Town Council will be discussing several items at its regular monthly meeting this Thursday, Feb. 20 that will be of interest to town residents and/or business owners.
YARD ORDINANCE
Town Attorney James T. Roberts plans to introduce a draft ordinance that governs the way properties are supposed to be kept up in Nashville town limits. It includes 25 points to comply with, including the height of grass, the condition of structures and retaining walls, the use of chemicals on properties, and the accumulation of “junk, trash and debris, boxes, lumber, scrap metal, junk vehicles or any other materials in such a manner that may provide rodent and pest harborage on the premises.” Such items can be stored on a property if they are properly elevated, the draft ordinance says.
An ordinance was discussed last year, but never passed. See the current draft here.
UNPAID BILL
The Brown County Music Center still owes the Town of Nashville about $12,000 for its initial sewer hook-on fee, Roberts told the town council. He intends to bring up this outstanding bill during the Feb. 20 council meeting.
Messages sent to the co-presidents of the music center’s management group about the bill were not immediately returned.
DRC RULES
The Nashville Development Review Commission has been going through all its standards for commercial properties in Nashville and is proposing some changes. Those have been passed to the town council for review.
Among those changes is a request to expand the DRC’s jurisdiction, giving the board a say in what happens on properties that are also zoned restricted buffer (RB). Currently, the DRC reviews changes to properties on land zoned B1, B2 and B3 in town limits (all business zones).
Other changes involve the installation of awnings; overhead or garage doors; the painting of bricks; the size of new decks; roof, window and siding materials; building demolition or relocation; landscaping; and other details.
Changes also are being proposed to the size, type and location of signs, including a rule that now prohibits handmade or posterboard signs.
Read all the proposed changes by clicking on this link as well as this link.
UTILITIES BOARD?
The town’s contracted strategic direction adviser, Dax Norton, will be introducing the concept of creating a utilities service board for the town. This board would be tasked with overseeing utilities operations (water and wastewater), the budgets for those utilities, and appointing a manager or superintendent. Read the draft document here.
NOISE ORDINANCE
Discussion at the Feb. 20 meeting will be a continuation of the discussion last fall about a local business’s compliance with the ordinance, “but (also) adding a much more comprehensive discussion about the noise code as a whole,” Norton explained. “Councilperson (Anna) Hofstetter wants some resolution prior to the start of the outdoor music and festival season.”
FYI
The Town of Nashville is now using interactive agendas, which allow readers to click on the blue links embedded in them to read the documents that will be discussed before the meeting happens. We’re posting them each week in our government calendar file and the town is posting them on its website, townofnashville.org. Here’s the one for this Thursday’s meeting:
[embeddoc url=”http://www.bcdemocrat.com/wp-content/files/sites/3/2020/02/Nashville-Town-Council-Agenda-2-20-20-.pdf” download=”all”]
