Chester to hold hearing on rural zoning changes July 22

The Chester Planning Commission will hold a public hearing July 22, 2024, at 6:30 p.m. at the Chester Town Hall, 556 Elm St. Using a Bylaw Modernization Grant the Commission has been implementing changes to zoning bylaw in phases over two years. This sixth and final phase principally affects Chester’s rural districts. The previous five phases focused on the more densely settled portions of town.

The goal of the public hearing is to solicit feedback from the community prior to submission to the Select Board for adoption. The Planning Commission encourages and welcomes all community feedback. You can read the proposed amendments by clicking on the link above, by going to www.chestervt.gov and clicking on the hearing notice which is on the landing page or at the town office.

Changes from the current zoning regulations include renaming districts to more closely match their purpose and allowed uses, creating wildlife habitat and travel corridors, replacing minimum lot sizes in rural districts with a maximum density standard, defining uses including building and construction trades, heavy construction trades, and tourist lodging and to enable clustering of residential units as tiny house and cottage courts.

Vermont’s villages and towns need a wider range of housing types to meet a changing population. While Chester’s population has seen little growth in the past decade, household size is decreasing. Single and two person households are now common, and families with children are less the norm and are smaller. Chester’s housing stock, on the other hand, consists mainly of larger houses that are old.

These bylaw changes seek to make it easier to modify existing larger homes and to build smaller and more varied homes. The Planning Commission has been assisted in this work by the Mount Ascutney Regional Commission and is guided by the Zoning for Great Neighborhoods initiative of 2020 and the HOME Act of 2023.

Chester first adopted Zoning Regulations in 1975 and Subdivision Regulations in 1977. The Zoning, Subdivision, and Flood Hazard Regulations were combined in 2014 into one Unified Development Bylaw, with the last major update in 2017.