New faces
Be quiet!
School district announces six new hires
How can little critters make such a racket?
Page 2
Page 11
May 26, 2022
POSTAL CUSTOMER
PRSRT STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID PERMIT #217 CONCORD, NH ECRWSSEDDM
Weekly news coverage for Charlotte and Hinesburg
thecitizenvt.com
Hinesburg approves new PD budget
Stick season
Budget sails through by more than 300 votes COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
PHOTO BY AL FREY
Champlain Valley’s Neva Williams battles South Burlington’s Ava Goyette for position to score or pass. The Wolves routed CVU 14-8 in the May 18 matchup.
Hinesburg voters overwhelmingly approved a police budget Tuesday, two months after shooting it down on March Town Meeting Day. The police department’s $800,491 budget passed 548-155. The approval brings some relief to the town, which for months has been debating how much to trim the department’s budget in response to residents’ town meeting vote. “This means we can start the process of rebuilding,” police Chief Anthony Cambridge said. See BUDGET on page 16
Charlotte works on major land use regulations overhaul Some rules, regs are ‘just plainly illegal,’ says town planner’ COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
The Charlotte Planning Commission has a big job this year: fixing its outdated land use regulations, which for years have created bureaucratic hurdles for property owners in town and are, in some cases, “just plainly illegal,” according to town planner Larry Lewack. Since the creation of the Development Review Board last year, the planning commission has set out to complete a major
overhaul of its land use regulations, aiming to have voters approve two rounds of changes — one in November and one in March on Town Meeting Day. “We want to promote more people in the community understanding what we’re up to,” Lewack said. “Because obviously the success of this at the end, when we present it to the voters, depends on people understanding why we’re doing this.” Charlotte last year moved to reconfigure its land regulatory bodies after months of discussion
about roadblocks to development. Lewack and the planning commission has been playing catchup since the beginning of the year to identify and fix burdensome regulations to try to streamline and simplify the rules governing land use and development in the town. Prior to the change, the planning commission oversaw permits for site plans, subdivisions and boundary adjustments, while the zoning board of adjustment was responsible for deciding on conditional use review applica-
tions and variances. The selectboard last year moved to consolidate all permitting reviews into a single body, the development review board. But with the outdated land use regulations still in place, the town was “essentially taking two volunteer board workloads and cramming the whole application workflow and permitting decisions into a single volunteer group,” Lewack said, creating a bottleneck of sorts for the zoners. “We were essentially creating an impossible workload for a strictly volunteer board,” he said. Much of that bottleneck seems to be the town’s stringent over-
sight of work done on an owner’s land. An owner of a single-family home, for example, that wants to tear down a rotting tool shed would need to go through a weeks-long or even months-long review process and pay a $500 application fee to the town. This, Lewack said, should be done simply by a quick administrative review. “We’re involving the development review board to approve you to tear down a rotting toolset,” Lewack said. “I think most people in town would agree that that just See REGULATIONS on page 4