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Sentinel News Staff Business Development Committee – Mayor’s Choice for Announcements
by Managing Editor
Mayor Rich Harris has chosen the bi-weekly meetings of the Business Development Committee to announce future plans for North Ogden City Ordinances. On May 18th, 2010, the Mayor announced that North Ogden plans to revise its General Plan in the next year or so. The city plans to spend about $45,000.00 on this effort according to the Mayor. The importance of this was discussed at the Freedom Coalition’s “Constitution and Municipalities Seminar” earlier this year where the participants essentially agreed that the General Plan is about the closest thing to a City Constitution that the cities have.
The video for this week is focused on the North Ogden City Council's consideration of changing zoning violations from Criminal to Civil. It has the city attorney explaining a little bit about what the difference is and why the NOCC is considering it.
On June 1st, the Mayor announced that the City is looking into changing the way it enforces zoning regulations by changing violations from criminal to civil. The Mayor said among other reasons for this was that it’s hard to prosecute individuals criminally, but easier to enforce the law on landowners. The City attorney says that criminal prosecution tends to be adversarial whereas civil prosecution is more civil and the violations can be heard by the city. |