Town to put moratorium on CUPs

The Belgium Town Board on Monday directed its attorney to draft a moratorium on conditional use permits to last until the municipality updates its zoning ordinance.

Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 67 into law in November 2017 and it “has really changed the way that all municipalities in Wisconsin are looking at conditional uses,” Zoning Administrator Charlie Parks said. 

“We need to abide by that, and it’s made it quite burdensome for municipalities now to allow for the conditional uses. A lot of that discretionary power has been taken away from the towns.”

The Plan Commission is slated to discuss the moratorium at its next meeting, tentatively scheduled for Feb. 20. The Town Board could approve the moratorium at its March 4 meeting.

“We need to pump the brakes a little bit to make sure that we’re doing everything we feel that the vast majority of our constituents would agree with,” Town Chairman Tom Winker said.

The moratorium does not impact the pending request of Dan Large to run a pay-to-hunt operation on a 65-acre parcel on the southeast corner of Lake Church and Silver Beach roads. The proposal has drawn large crowds to meetings with many voicing safety concerns and the loss of quality of life due to increased noise from gunfire.

Parks said he expects the zoning ordinance review could take about six months.

“You just need time to sit down and thoughtfully go through this stuff,” he said.

“We need to take a look at what we have listed as conditional uses and see if it’s good for the town or bad for the town.”

The town will not be looking at  conditional use permits that have already been approved, just the allowable uses, Plan Commission member Dennis Dimmer said.

The Plan Commission will begin the examination of its zoning ordinances after the moratorium is in place. Parks said it may get help from the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

“We try to keep the zoning ordinance as simple as possible, as few rules as possible,” Parks said, adding changes have to be made when rules come down from higher powers.

Winker said “Our zoning ordinance is about 65 pages in length,” and added that a neighboring town’s is 265 pages long. 

“The problem is as you make it bigger it takes a legal scholar not only to draft it but also to defend it,” he said.