Pittsfield Ordinance Committee Considers Code Analysis
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Ordinance Review Committee is looking into an editorial review of the city's laws to bring them up to date.
At its second meeting on Monday, the panel was given a presentation from Zachary Dumont of General Code, a company that offers codification services and has been working with Pittsfield for about 17 years.
The five-member committee had its first meeting last month and was re-established to review the city code.
Dumont proposed an editorial legal analysis that looks for things like grammatical errors, outdated language, legality, duplicates, and anything that may not be correct. It takes about 145 days, and the city would receive the recommendations and can choose whether it wants to take action on them.
"Communities pass ordinances, bylaw changes all the time every year and not everybody actually ever goes back to look [at] 'Hey, have we discussed this before? In 200 some years of history have we ever touched this topic beforehand?'" he said.
Next month, the committee will vote on whether to go forward with the review. The analysis has a $7,300 price tag, and the panel will be proposing it to the administration to see if the funds are available.
Department heads will also be consulted to see what they feel needs to be amended.
Overall, members found it to be a good investment.
Chair Jody Phillips said the last review committee she was on received a proposal from the company in 2014 and decided to just make changes that conformed to the new charter.
"The main difference between what you received in 2014 versus now is that was for the recodification versus this one where it's just a standard editorial legal analysis. The key difference with a recodification is they'll go through, and they will take a look at the code more from a bedrock level and try to build it back up to where you have a nice strong solid document," Dumont explained.
"What I mean by that is typically what we do to perform an organizational analysis, we will make sure that items that are supposed to be grouped together are grouped together correctly. Sometimes bylaws end up down here when they should be over there and etc. They'll go through, they'll kick it back to the community and say, 'Hey, this is what we recommend the structure of your code to look like if you're happy with it, we'll move on to the next part.'
"Typically, that second part is when they do the editorial legal analysis. And in there you'll see more of a back and forth between the editors and the community."
Phillips said the scope was limited during the last review to making the ordinances conform with the new charter and not going through to look for inconsistencies.
"So that was really limited the last time," she added.
"I think this process doesn't take the place of what we're going to do still, but it enhances what we're going to do. We'll still go through chapter by chapter and make the decisions on what we want to change and what we don't want to change and it's still up to the committee."
During the meeting, members suggested that it would be helpful if zoning was included in the ordinances, as it currently exists in the city's general code.
Tags: city code, ordinances,
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