By MICHAEL CRIMMINS
Glasgow News 1
Barren County Judge-Executive Jamie Bewley Byrd announced that a public meeting has been scheduled for April 2 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. with getting residents inputs on countywide zoning being the “main focus.”
“Everybody will have the opportunity to speak and sign up,” Byrd said during a recent WCLU interview. “We just want to listen to the public. You see a lot of things on social media and we want to allow them to speak to us. Of course, the main focus is zoning and my reasoning for [the public meeting] is to [have the attendees] say why or why not because I really am in the middle ground in all of this.”
Planning Director Kevin Myatt said county zoning would be “one of the biggest pieces of county legislation” that would affect nearly all 45,000 Barren County residents.
“This is one of the largest pieces of local legislation that can be passed for a county,” Myatt said. “That’s how big this is because it [would] affect every single person in the county.”
“The only other thing that I can think of that would be bigger is an occupational tax,” he added.
Myatt said if the county decided to implement zoning it would take “multiple, multiple” public meetings to inform as many people as possible with around six to eight months to finally implement.
The nearest county to Barren that has countywide zoning is Warren, but Myatt emphasized that does not mean Barren County’s zoning ordinance would be the same.
“We’ll write it as lax or as stringent as the community wants us to,” Myatt said. “If Barren County wants zoning [then] its citizens will dictate its stringency.”
Hypothetically, the countywide zoning would go to the Joint City-County Planning Commission and be treated like a text amendment with a public hearing. After the planning commission meeting, the zoning language would go to the Barren County Fiscal Court for the magistrates’ approval. Myatt said all the due diligence of crafting the language and taking testimony, which would be given during the public hearing, would be performed by the commission and all the magistrates could do would be approve it or not.
Much like anything else, Myatt said there would be advantages and disadvantages to having countywide zoning.
“There would be rules and regulations, so it’s a give and take,” Myatt said.
This story will be updated with additional information later today.
