McHenry Celebrates 150 Years
With New Development Controls

By WILLIAM J. BUSSE, Mayor, City of McHenry

In December, 1986, at the end of its Sesquicentennial Year, the City of McHenry (population 13,538) completed and adopted a comprehensive revision of its 1962 Zoning Ordinance.

Several things are noteworthy about our experience that may be useful to other communities with out-of-date land use regulations.

A Cautious Approach
The City took a cautious and deliberate approach to deciding what to do about our old Ordinance. We first hired a zoning consultant to carefully review the present regulations — without writing any new ones. The resulting Zoning Ordinance Assessment prepared by Gann Associates of Roselle, Illinois, gave us some new ideas and options to guide our thinking. The City Council then decided that after 24 years there were so many problems with our present code that continued piecemeal amendments would no longer do the job.

Minimal Time and Expense
A total rewrite of our 178-page Ordinance was completed and reviewed and revised by the City Council within just seven months yet without the need for a large, or even small, in-house planning staff.

The City of McHenry has no city planner and just a single building inspector, who also serves as Building and Zoning Officer. Use of Gann Associates to prepare the draft regulations and the intensive involvement of the entire City Council in paragraph-by-paragraph review allowed us to accomplish without delay what in some communities can take one to two years or more. And it was much less expensive this way than supporting the continuing cost of full-time staff.

The Process
From the outset, we knew we did not want a planner to simply come in and tell us what kind of zoning he thought we ought to have. So we selected a consultant with this in mind and developed a process of working with the consultant and our City Attorney in a step-by-step process to develop new regulations.

We held a series of 16 meetings in which the Mayor, the full City Council, the City Attorney, the Building Officer, and John L. Gann of Gann Associates reviewed the ordinance section by section. At the first meeting the consultant listened and we talked — about what kind of Zoning Ordinance we wanted. And the subsequent meetings were not elaborate presentations by the consultant but shirtsleeves working sessions around a table in which everyone threw out ideas. While this format took a lot of the aldermen's time, it served to produce regulations that are genuinely our own.

Controlling Impact of Multi-Family
Several years back, because of concerns about apartment development, the City reduced maximum allowable multi-family density by 41 percent. Our new ordinance has given us a better way to deal with multi-family concerns than simply slashing density. Called Standards for Population and Environmental Equivalent Density (SPEED), it controls the environmental consequences of high-density development better than most ordinances that simply restrict the number of dwelling units.

A multi-family "dwelling unit" can mean a household of one or a family of five. Which it is can greatly affect the community. For this reason, the McHenry Ordinance sets different standards for allowable density within the same zoning district based on the number of bedrooms the units have. This better controls the actual population living in the development and therefore the amount of traffic, the number of children in the public schools, the need for sewer capacity, and other variables.

For example, in our highest-density RM-2 District, if you want to build all one-bedroom units, you can have 24 of them to the acre. If you build all two-bedroom units, however, you can't have more than 14 per acre. In both cases, the actual population generated is about the same.

Landscaping
Our 1962 regulations had negligible requirements for screening and landscaping. The new regulations have an entire six-page section devoted to these requirements.

We now require screening between non-residential and residential areas and landscaping bordering and inside parking lots. Our provisions encourage the use of landscaped earth berms and the preservation of existing trees on a development site. The new requirements should improve both the appearance of new development and its compatibility with its neighbors.

Minor Variances
The Council wanted to make it simpler for the City's homeowners to obtain variance approvals for minor items like garages, storage sheds, and room additions. So our consultant developed a special provision for Minor Variances that provides for a streamlined review and approval process.

Both Relaxed and Tightened Requirements
McHenry did not want to follow the lead of some municipalities that have "improved" their regulations by making them excessively restrictive, to the point of controlling even the color of a sign you can put up. While our new Ordinance is more demanding in many areas, in other areas it is less restrictive than our old provisions were.

For example, zoning standards for already devel-

February 1987 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 17

oped neighborhoods are now based on the lot dimensions actually there rather than the higher standards we might want in new developments. The minimum size for a Planned Unit Development was reduced from 40 acres to two acres. Our commercial districts now allow a wider range of uses.

The maximum building height in business and industrial districts has been replaced by a more flexible standard. Our provisions for nonconforming use are more lenient. We reduced the size and in some cases the number of required parking spaces. Parking is now permitted without limitation in required front yards subject to landscaping requirements. We no longer prohibit billboards, though we still restrict them. And, of course, in McHenry your sign can still be any color you want.

Better Downtown Zoning
The previous business zoning of our old downtown area was designed with newer highway and shopping center style commercial development in mind. As a result, nearly every property downtown was nonconforming, meaning that were it to be over 50 percent destroyed it could not legally be rebuilt.

Now we have a special district for our downtown area that reflects the small lots and lack of on-site parking that predominate in that part of town. The regulations do not require century-old development to conform to modern standards, and they allow downtown buildings to be repaired and rebuilt without major changes.

Easy-to-Use-Format
With a small city staff, McHenry cannot afford to have a Zoning Ordinance that requires an entire department of employees and a computer or two to administer and interpret. With this in mind, Gann Associates designed our regulations to be easy-to-use.

One way this was done was by putting as many of the requirements as possible in easy-to-read tables rather than burying them in legalistic text. Virtually all the Ordinance's quantitative requirements are in table form. You can even find everything you need to submit for most kinds of zoning petitions in just one table.

Page-top headings on every page identify the section of the Ordinance you are in, and, except for the definitions, no section is longer than 15 pages. The Ordinance includes a detailed index. Subheadings are used on every page to make individual provisions easy to find. Computer-generated type fonts give the regulations a typeset look without the expense of typesetting. And short paragraphs and plenty of white space make the regulations about as easy to read as it is possible for a legal ordinance to be.

McHenry can't expect the new Zoning Ordinance to last our next 150 years — or even another 24. But to deal with today's development challenges we now have today's regulatory tools. •

Page 18 / Illinois Municipal Review / February 1987