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The Valley City Council met on Monday night for their regular business meeting, in which they held a public meeting to amend the city’s zoning ordinances for homes.

Reid Riley, the Director of Planning and Development, said the reason for amending the ordinance was due to some questions that arose from citizens. 

“The reason for that is we’ve had a lot of people coming into the office lately inquire about building tiny homes in some of our subdivisions,” Riley said. “The definition of a tiny home in our building codes is 400 square feet, and the planning commission just didn’t feel like that would fit into our current residential neighborhoods.”

Riley added that, “in order to protect the current residential neighborhoods,” they decided to require a minimum square footage for the houses. The new requirements are based off of the square footage already in place in these zoning districts. 

This was the final public hearing to confirm an amendment that would add a minimum home size based on districts. The districts up for amendment are FAR (Forest Agriculture and Recreation District), RR (Rural Residential District), and R-1 through R-5 (Low to Medium Density Residential Districts).

The planning commission proposed the following minimums for houses in these districts: 

FAR: 900 square foot minimum

RR: 1400 square foot minimum

R-1: 1400square foot minimum

R-2R-3: 1200 square foot minimum

R-4: 900 square foot minimum

R-5: 900 square foot minimum

The amendments are only changing square footage requirements, not any other codes, like setbacks, general use and other regulations.  

There was no public comment during the hearing. Council member Jim Jones ask that the rules be suspended and there be no second reading and pass the amendments after the first reading. The vote to allow a vote and the vote to adopt the new zoning requirements passed unanimously. 

Valley residents can find their zoning district on the city’s website at   https://cityofvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Zoning-map.pdf