NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The city will be upgrading its code over the next two years. 

 

The City Council last week heard from Zachary Dumont, an account manager with General Code, which manages municipal codes for some 4,000 local governments across the nation and nearly 300 in New England. Council President Bryan Sapienza introduced Dumont, noting the city has is behind on updating its online and written ordinances. 

 

"We've been serving the city of North Adams for at least the last 40 years, and have helped you over that time, maintain your municipal code," said Dumont. "But obviously, based on contents of Mr. Sapienza said, there's some revitalization work that should be occurring."

 

The total cost of the work will be $19,540 spread over two or more fiscal years and will consist of a complete review to find contradictory ordinances, outdated materials, ensuring new ordinances have been properly recorded, and make the code cleaner and more transparent. 

 

"We'll look at every single item in your code as it exists today as well as several outstanding items that your city clerk will be sending to me over the next week or so," he said. "We're going to make sure that everything that you have on your books is compliant with Mass state law. We're also going to make sure that anything that is currently enforced in your code does not conflict or overlap anything else that's pre-existing."

 

Dumont explained to the audience that the code is a collection of laws, rules and regulations that govern how each city and town should operate.

 

"A code can represent your general ordinances, whether it's regulations governing council operations, zoning, dog, licensing, anything in between," he said. "Basically, a municipal code is the composition of anything that carries the legal force and effect of law, kind of like a state statute book, but more tailored to what you need on your day to day here in North Adams."

 

A team of editors will first bring together all of the outstanding ordinances and regulations and build an initial code structure; they will then perform a substantive review and make recommendations where the code can be improved, modernized, adapted, and "basically realign things with the current state."

 

Problems occur when ordinances are amended and original language is not repealed or is duplicated in other ordinances. This creates errors for enforcement officers and raises issues of possible litigation. 

 

Dumont said the average recodification time is about 24 months but some communities have pushed through to get it done in 18 months. 

 

"I think the last time you guys did anything significant was 1964, so about 61 years," he said. "As a part of that editorial and legal review, we're going to look for every single thing that we can find that might be out of alignment, might be a little bit of skew, and we're going to come back to the city and say, 'hey, we found XYZ issue. How would you like to best correct that?'"

 

He estimated it would take about three months to go through the city's code, which he said was larger than some similar communities. This would be followed by a "sandbox environment" when officials can go through the results and supply feedback that will take it to the draft stage. 

 

"You're going to have a very nice clean copy of your new ordinances. You're going have a very nice clean copy of your new zoning regulations, and eventually it'll come back to the City Council for adoption and republication," Dumont said. This would then be uploaded to the city website and published in several hardbound copies.

 

An ad hoc code committee is recommended to review the work as its done. Sapienza said he would advise the next council president to establish such a committee with the city clerk as a member. 

 

"This is a process that I'm extremely excited about. We've been talking about this for about two years now we're finally getting this off the ground," said Councilor Ashley Shade. "This is going to create two very, very important things for the people of North Adams. One, it's going to create a code that is transparent, and two, that is much easier to access. 

 

"It's important that people know what laws they have to follow, and if you try to search for them now in our code, it's a mess. You find conflicts everywhere."

 

Councilor Andrew Fitch asked City Clerk Tina Leonesio her thoughts on the process and how much of her time it will take. 

 

"I can tell you that this is going to be a fabulous process. It's going to be important that we put a group, team of people together, because it's going to be over two more fiscal years," she said. "Our first payment is going to go out in this fiscal year so that General Code can start the process. It'll be next fiscal year before we're getting information from General Code and working on it."