Dade County District 2 Commissioner Phillip Hartline had earlier promised to hold a public meeting in his own district before the official Sept. 30 hearing on the county's proposed land use ordinance. Now it looks like he's pulling it off just inside that deadline--Hartline's hearing will be at 2 p.m. Sept. 29, the Sunday before the Monday hearing.
Hartline has announced the gathering as a town-hall-style meeting. He will hold it at Davis Elementary in his Sand Mountain district.
Dade communications clerk Carey Anderson said Hartline had finalized his plans just last night. She said she believed the delay was due to trouble coming up with a time and place.
The land use ordinance--still a work in progress, or at least the county has not yet released a draft for public consumption--came about as a result of popular demand when Wildwood residents felt threatened by the possibility of a chicken processing plant. But Dade is a rural county with a long history of resisting any whiff of zoning, and Hartline may well wish to let his constituents weigh in on the issue before committing himself one way or the other. He is the only commissioner who voted against a temporary ban on permitting for heavy industry, the commission's stopgap measure while the ordinance is being drafted, but also the only one who has spoken iin favor of zoning in general.
