Muller: Bath Comprehensive Plan leading to land use laws
By ROB PRICE THE COURIER-ADVOCATE

BATH -- Bath town Supervisor Fred Muller sees the recently submitted draft comprehensive plan leading to a two-step legislative process for the Bath town board.

At the end of that process, Muller told The Courier last week, the Town of Bath will likely have a more sophisticated municipal code employing a series of land use regulations to regulate future development.

Step one, Muller said, involves crafting a definitive comprehensive plan based on the preliminary plan developing by the municipality's ad hoc comprehensive planning committee. That group submitted the draft comprehensive plan to the town board earlier this month.

The final draft of the plan may not be as extensive as the planning committee's document, Muller said.

"A lot of data and recommendation in there may be included or not," he said.

Step two: Drafting land use regulations based on the general plan.

Muller noted land use regulations stop short of a full blown zoning code, which does not have the support of the town board. "It's not the board's intent to go to zoning," he said, adding land use regulations tend to be drafted around specific issues: wind turbine developments or adult products stores, for example.

It was the opening of an adult products store on Worth Road that led two years ago to the formation of the Comprehensive Planning Committee. The town board in 2006 imposed a moratorium on allowing adult stores to open, and created the ad hoc committee to investigate land use regulations that would control the siting of any new adult store.

"The first thing to look at is adult businesses," Muller told The Courier.

The draft comprehensive plan recommends requiring a minimum 1,000-foot distance between any adult products store and a "sensitive use" property, defined as a private residence, school or place of worship.