ADRIAN — At their April 21 meeting, Adrian city commissioners received an update from planning commission chairman Mike Jacobitz on efforts to create a new zoning ordinance.

“Our current zoning ordinance has been updated and revised many times over the last 20 to 25 years,” Jacobitz said. “It’s significantly out of date and includes a number of inconistencies, and is sometimes difficult to understand.”

A process with a consulting group, funded in part by a state grant, resulted in a draft ordinance that the planning commission felt still needed a lot of work. 

“While the draft is an excellent example of a zoning ordinance, it falls short as Adrian’s zoning ordinance,” Jacobitz said. 

He said some essential elements of Adrian’s current zoning ordinance were missing, and some of the draft’s requirements were too onerous for Adrian.

“We are not trying to scrap what came out of the last two years of effort,” he said, “but rather to use the strengths and to reintroduce the essential elements that were missing, and to remove some of the aspects that were obviously intended for a larger community with a lot more enforcement staff than Adrian has.”

When the process is done, Jacobitz said, the ordinance will be shorter and easier to understand than the current ordinance.

Jacobitz said the planning commission hopes to hold public open houses for discussion over the summer. This would be followed by a public hearing, and then once the planning commission gives its approval, it would go to the city commission for a first and second reading before it is adopted.