Underhill Rejects Upzoning

Underhill voters rejected all three upzoning articles on the town meeting ballot.

What's next?

Underhill's zoning used to be simple and effective. Now it is a sprawling mess. A complete rewrite of the regulatory code, consistent with previous town plans, to eliminate the huge amount of redundancy and awkward, unnecessary text would be best.

Voters are looking to maintain the existing zoning districts and the long-standing natural resource conservation basis for zoning. As impenetrably massive as the current cut-and-paste zoning regulations are, there is a lot that could be done to follow the will of the voters:

* Make a real commitment to stop messing around with density. Every time there is a change in permitted density, some people win and some people lose. It sets up a rent-seeking race that consumes political attention and never ends well.
* Clearly define the size of a development unit.
* Enable transfer of development rights, and establish a market-maker to bank development rights, facilitate transfers, and a regulatory structure that ensures transfers are in the public interest. There should be no sending/receiving zones, only a public interest performance test.
* Get serious about an energy efficiency code with verification and building commissioning.
* Allow density bonuses only for genuinely innovative projects that advance the state of landscape design, site layout and building design and engineering.

There is a lot of work needed to respond to the climate crisis, and anticipate extreme weather, but the above actions would be a good start.