In October, I wrote a piece about how the commissioners had passed a resolution to ban running a particular computer program. Ostensibly, they were trying to make it illegal to run loud generators, but instead of writing an ordinance about generators or sound, they issued an ordinance that would include three silent computers that can fit in the palm of your hand without saying a single thing about what they claimed they were trying to address.

Despite having full access to paid legal counsel, despite technologically savvy citizens who are happy to provide advice for free, despite knowing that the issue with a loud generator is, well, the loud generator, the commissioners managed to pass an ordinance that was completely divorced from the actual sound problem. It was written to ban what a tech- and business-savvy middle schooler might run in their bedroom, while being useless when it comes to preventing another identical generator-run installation that uses a different algorithm.

If the commissioners, in an effort to prevent loud, noisy generators, accidentally ended up banning things so trivial, we should be very concerned that when they spend your taxpayer money in lobbing their nuclear bomb of zoning at solar and wind installations, it might not only miss what they say is the mark, but do significant collateral damage. That was my concern back in October. What happened since that silly moratorium made me realize that I severely underestimated just how bad that blast radius could be.

There is a planning committee created by the commissioners to make recommendations on zoning. As usual, this committee contains people who were not elected. They also didn’t go through the normal process of having citizens submit letters of interest. Instead, the members were hand-selected by the commissioners. This isn’t necessarily a bad way to select people and it has a distinct advantage for anyone trying to figure out where the commissioners are trying to take the county. This hand selection means that when the committee passes a resolution, it is being made by the people the commissioners felt most represented their goals for the future.

So with that background, residents should be paying very close attention when the planning committee votes on a resolution. We got a very insightful glimpse on page 7 of the agenda packet for the commissioners meeting on 11/17. There was a resolution, passed unanimously by the planning committee, that said:

The Planning Committee, passes unanimously. recommends that the Bourbon County Board of Commissioners enact a moratorium, effective immediately, requiring that any new business—specifically, commercial or industrial—that is not agricultural in nature and located in unincorporated areas of the county, be required to obtain a special use permit prior to commencing operations. This moratorium should reference the existing Bourbon County zoning (taxation) map as the basis for determining current land use designations.

The purpose of this moratorium is to protect the county and its residents while the Planning Committee continues the process of developing more detailed and comprehensive zoning regulations.

There were some legal issues with the recommendation, so the commissioners didn’t end up discussing it, but even if they couldn’t put a moratorium on all businesses worded in this way, it doesn’t diminish the desired goal. We can clearly see what the committee (and the commissioners who appointed them) see as a desired future. The planning committee, that hand-selected group the commissioners thought were the best people in the county to accomplish their zoning goals, unanimously resolved to recommend a moratorium on all new non-agricultural businesses in the county. It didn’t pass by a small margin; it wasn’t just discussed. They unanimously passed a resolution to make this recommendation, and that is a very big deal.

Some might say it was just the political back and forth and doesn’t really mean anything, that some of the people voting for it didn’t think it would pass, etc. But consider the actual implications: If you want to start a commercial lawn mowing business and you are outside the city limits, they want you to have to get special permission from the commissioners. If you want to start a business doing small manufacturing of high-end telescopes, the resolution recommends that your business should be illegal until the commissioners give it their blessing. If you want to start exercising your skills as a mechanic, start a printing company, create an LLC to make furniture, or anything else in the rural county areas, every single person on this committee voted that you should be required to come hat in hand to the commissioners and answer all their questions about your business and beg them to make an exception to the moratorium to allow you to pursue your business idea. 

This desired change by the planning committee is a fundamental shift. We currently live in a county where the default position is that you are allowed to start any legal business and move forward with it. You might have a good idea and do well. You might have a bad idea and go bankrupt. Either way, you are free to pursue your capitalistic endeavors without being subject to the whims, biases, and the sometimes general confusion of the commissioners.

For an average member of the community, voting for a resolution to recommend such an action would have come with a huge reputational risk. Would you really want to be on the record as having voted to move from a default of saying yes to business to a default of saying, “you have to get permission from the commissioners first”? Somehow, not a single person on the committee, who I might remind you, were hand-selected by the commissioners, looked at the resolution and said, “I’m not sure I want my name on something that does this to our local economy.” Instead, every single one voted for it.

As I’ve said before, the issue with zoning is not whether there is a hypothetical way to implement it that would do no or only minimal harm. The question is how likely we are to get a future where the damage from zoning isn’t egregiously worse than whatever the commissioners think they are trying to attack by this massive expansion of their powers. This unanimous resolution from the planning committee gives us a peek into the future we are headed toward, a future that further increases the probability that the “cure” of zoning will turn out to be worse than the “disease.”

Mark Shead

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