Could more 'nimble' pact replace extraterritorial zoning ordinance?

The Mount Horeb Village Board flexed its considerable land use powers last year when the neighboring Town of Blue Mounds declined to come to the table and come up with a joint vision regarding the future of development there. 

While the move swiftly achieved its intended effect, giving Mount Horeb ample options to control its fate near the border in the coming years, and bringing members of the Blue Mounds Town Board scrambling to the table, last week government leaders in Mount Horeb toyed with doing things a bit differently now. They are considering swapping their extraterritorial zoning ordinance,  which was approved in 2020, for an intergovernmental agreement that village planner Mike Slavney described as “a much more nimble” document than the “blunt instrument” of extraterritorial zoning.

“We’ve been meeting with the Town of Blue Mounds, we’re looking at the extraterritorial zoning ordinance, we knew they weren’t a huge fan of that,” village administrator Nic Owen told the village board. “There is actually some tediousness to that, and work to it on the village side as well, so we talked to Mike [Slavney] and he has an idea for how we can accomplish the same thing without the same level of tediousness in the administration of the extraterritorial zoning.”

Irked by Blue Mounds’ sometimes antagonistic comments regarding the village and its approach to land use, village trustees in Mount Horeb have recently been reluctant to give up the leverage they took when they wrote and approved the current extraterritorial zoning ordinance, which allows them to work with willing land owners near the border to achieve their mutual land use goals. 

But Slavney said an intergovernmental agreement would achieve many of the same goals while also helping to heal tensions with Blue Mounds. 

“What I’m recommending the village consider is working with the town on an intergovernmental agreement,” he said. “The state law was changed about 10 years ago to really clarify the ground rules on intergovernmental agreements, so that they are permanent, so they can have an amendments clause where both sides agree. The agreement can be finetuned, maybe to represent a response to something that maybe wasn’t anticipated in the initial agreement. And I believe they can really get to the heart of the priorities of both the village and a town when they are being discussed. There is a very good example of an agreement next door in Verona.”

Such agreements can set up an array of rules, regulations and guidelines for development undertaken by both entities.  

Plus, according to Slavney, “if there is a lawsuit that challenges the agreement, the state will help to defend it.”

“Recently, I worked on a similar agreement in Delavan, Wisconsin, where the town and the city have a long history of real animosity, much worse than anything in Dane County, but there was a planetary alignment in 2016 and the town and the city agreed to a similar agreement [there],” he continued. 

Following the passage last year of the extraterritorial zoning ordinance, Mount Horeb and Blue Mounds formed a committee dedicated to working out land use issues in the extraterritorial area. Owen said some of those same people could help draft the intergovernmental agreement. 

“So, what’s the next step?” asked Mount Horeb trustee Cathy Scott. 

“I think we wanted tonight to be kind of educational for the board and get some feedback on whether you thought this was something worth pursuing,” replied Owen. 

“This is what we wanted to do to begin with,” said Scott. “They are the ones that caused all this.”

The board took no formal action on the matter but could at a future meeting.