The Northampton City Council met on April 16 to discuss several ordinances, including a couple that are outdated, according to the city solicitor.
Photo credit: Northampton Open Media
NORTHAMPTON — An ordinance to exempt two-family homes over 2,500 square feet from site plan approval will face further scrutiny from across multiple municipal bodies in the coming weeks.
After discussion during the City Council’s April 16 meeting, the body decided that the ordinance will be reviewed by the council’s Committee on Legislative Matters and the Planning Board, where a public hearing will eventually be scheduled before it comes back to the full City Council for final approval.
During the April 16 meeting, Planning and Sustainability Director Carolyn Misch explained that the ordinance was discussed about a month prior with the Committee on Legislative Matters before coming to the council for a first reading.
“Basically, the primary consideration is to remove the site plan review criteria or Planning Board public hearing for two-families [homes], just as single-families are exempted from having to come to the Planning Board, regardless of size. The City Council adopted an ordinance back in 2022 allowing two-families everywhere in the city, but currently, the way the zoning ordinance is written, if you’re proposing a structure that has two units in it and it exceeds 2,000 square feet, you’re still coming into a Planning Board approval process, which creates impediments to people who want to build or add one additional unit,” explained Misch. “So, this really is a mechanism to say, in total, if you’re building a two-family, it is by right, you don’t have to go to the Planning Board or site plan review.”
Misch added that the proposed ordinance also attempts to increase the threshold for site plan review, explaining that currently, the intermediate project threshold is 2,000 square feet, and the major project threshold is 5,000 square feet for the gross area of construction across the city, no matter the project type. The threshold would increase from 2,000 to 2,500 square feet if the ordinance passes.
“The Planning Board has discussed this and looked at it, and the rationale behind that is that 2,000 square feet is a fairly small-scale project to push people into a public hearing process that takes two to three months,” said Misch. “It adds time and money in terms of getting site engineers to develop a site plan for applicants, so it’s just giving a little more wiggle room for those small-scale projects to be able to move forward without that additional cost.”
Misch said Legislative Matters and the Planning Board will look to host a joint public hearing on this ordinance, and following that, it will return to the City Council for a vote.
At Large Councilor Meg Robbins asked if the ordinance would exempt developers from coming before the Planning Board in order to secure the right to build. Misch explained that, as it stands, single-family homes of any size are exempt and that this ordinance would exempt a two-family from going in front of the board. The proposed ordinance does not exempt zoning requirements.
“We actually have design criteria specifically for two-family construction, which is different from any other residential uses. The applicants still need to comply with those very specific design criteria that the City Council adopted back in 2022, and those are absolutely still applicable. It’s just the process of going to the Planning Board for the board to just look and check the box that the applicant has actually met all that design criteria when in fact it’s already specified in the code, and you have to meet those,” Misch added. “The only reason why someone would come to the Planning Board if two families are exempt and you’re building, let’s say a 3,000-square-foot structure with two 1500-square-foot units, is if the applicant has a different way of designing a project that doesn’t specifically meet the two-family design standards. That would trigger a Planning Board review. But, if you’re going to meet all those standards in the checklist in the zoning ordinance, you wouldn’t have to go to the Planning Board.”
Council President Rachel Maiore said that this ordinance was in line with the efforts made by the council in 2022 around two-family homes.
“I just wanted to say that the reason we picked this up in 2022 … to get single-family homes and construction of them, or renovation of them, on par with two-families, because there’s kind of a bias in our country and in our state toward allowing greater latitude to single-family homes. So, with a nod to the housing crunch, that is kind of the philosophy behind the 2022 action we took on council and on this item,” Maiore said.
Other ‘out-of-date’ ordinances
During the same City Council meeting, the body voted unanimously to refer the rescission of three city ordinances to Legislative Matters, where they will be reviewed before coming back to the council for a final vote. These ordinances were identified, and changes were recommended through the work done by the 2025 Ordinance Review Committee, which was led by Ward 4 Councilor Jeremy Dubs and At Large Councilor Garrick Perry.
“Basically, these are very out of date and not really relevant to today’s world, so it seems like it’s time for them to go,” said Dubs regarding the decision to recommend these changes out of the Ordinance Review Committee’s 2025 report.
The first item in this group was an ordinance rescinding section 241-4, “Obscene or Profane Language in Street Prohibited.” The ordinance simply states, “No person shall accost or address another person in any street with obscene or profane language.” According to the Ordinance Review Committee’s 2025 report, Solicitor Alan Seewald informed the committee that this section is unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable, leading to the committee’s recommendation to rescind this ordinance.
Also included was the recommendation to rescind ordinance 312-87, which prohibits thumbing, or hitch-hiking. According to its report, the committee found the ordinance to be outdated and voted to recommend it be rescinded.
The third ordinance is section 245-13 through 245-20, “Inclusive, Hawkers and Peddlers of Fish, Fruits and Vegetables,” which outlines licensing requirements for hawkers and peddlers. According to its report, the committee reviewed these sections and found the language outdated, unnecessary and discriminatory against noncitizens, leading to the recommendation that these sections be rescinded.
“I want the public to know that if you’re really into finding out some of the weird ordinances, you can go and look at the Ordinance Review Committee meetings if that’s your bag, where we had some giggles about hawkers, and peddlers of fish, and thumbing, but we did a lot of due diligence to get here to rescind it, so I feel really comfortable sending this forward,” said Perry.
Robbins added, “I love thinking about this city and the discussions that must of happened in order to make these ordinances. I just want to say, I had no idea, and thank you very much for not arresting me, because there’s a couple here, I think we could all say we’ve probably had challenges with before.”
