What is 'Property Owner Notification'?

First, let me introduce the topic of property owner notifications. Many of you will already know what this process involves, but for the rest here's a primer on the procedure.

The purpose of the owner notification process is to make citizens of our city aware of impending changes that may affect their property or their quality of life. These changes can be actions of the Planning and Zoning Commission, the City Council, or the Zoning Board of adjustments. When any of these bodies call a public meeting to discuss certain changes involving property, the city is required to notify all property owners within 200 feet of the subject tract of the meeting.

The types of changes that these bodies can consider range from rezoning, granting a Specific Use Permit or Variance, approving a Site Plan request, or replatting property into a new configuration. Any of these can have a potential impact on the adjacent properties.

There are certain legal responsibilities in doing the notification procedure correctly--most notably making sure that the correct property owners are notified. Under notifying or over notifying may cause the hearing to be declared illegal and delay a case until the next meeting, possibly up to six weeks. It is also important that the correct parties are notified. The current owners or tenants are supposed to get the information.

In the vast majority of property owner notifications, there are no problems encountered. Solutions have been devised to eliminate problems with multiple parcels and multiple owners, and these solutions fit within a literal translation of what the code requires.

Only in situations where we deal with non-property owners are we not able to produce a full notification list, and then only in use specific cases are we concerned with notifying non-owners. So the current methodology seems to handle 100% of the cases to a legally correct conclusion, with only a few cases requiring  extra work.

Conclusion