Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Duck Planning Board members, at their Wednesday, April 9 meeting, recommended approval of a text amendment allowing some single-family dwelling additions to match an existing non-conforming roof-line height.

The change, which will require Town Council approval, is for structures built prior to July 3, 2002, provided the addition is no more than one foot above the zoning district’s maximum building height limit.

After discussing different matching height limits and measurement methods, the board settled on the one foot limit as presented and voted unanimously to recommend council approve the amendment.

A much longer discussion took place on fill and retaining wall requirements.

Walls, fences and bulkheads are currently limited to heights of up to six feet in residential and 10 feet in commercial settings with fill regulated by a number of depth, slope, adjacent grade and property line setback guidelines.

Recognizing that Duck has a wide variety of topographies, an increase in the number of special use permit requests led staff to request a guideline review.

Planning Board members discussed allowing staff greater authority in issuing some fill requests while looking for opportunities to allow greater latitude with the goal of sending as little as possible for council review.

While discussing organization of code and differences between bulkheads and retaining walls, it was noted that there is some need for greater flexibility, it was also acknowledged that it is difficult to write guidelines to meet every potential building request.

After a lengthy discussion, staff was given guidelines for possible code amendment to be considered at a future meeting.

There was a brief discussion only on outdoor lighting issues following town attorney Robert B. Hobbs Jr.’s recommendation the board take no action due to some pending legislation.

The board did, however, discuss enforcement of guidelines and illumination measurement methods as well as having staff conduct a public survey with comments on how detailed the questions need to be.

Other business for the day included approving the March 12 meeting minutes and a 2025 trend report for planners review by community development director Joe Heard that indicate more than 50 percent of households are single or couples with no children and there is a trend in multi-generational households.

The next scheduled Planning Board meeting is at 4 p.m. on May 14.

READ ABOUT MORE NEWS HERE.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE COASTLAND TIMES TODAY!