Important land use building blocks are in place after Tuesday's meeting of the Mower County Board of Commissioners.

A public hearing was held on a revised comprehensive plan for Mower County as well as a new zoning ordinance and a specific adult entertainment uses ordinance.

All three were individually approved and in that order. "We have called them building blocks through this whole process," said Darryl W. Franklin, county planning director and zoning administrator. "Each one has to be in place before the other can be enforced and that's what the county commissioners have done now."

The county board's actions Tuesday ended a near two-year long process of reviewing and rewriting the land use documents.

The county retained the services of Dahlgren, Shardlow, Uban of Minneapolis and St. Cloud to rewrite the county's comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance.

The firm -- at the county board's insistence -- involved the public at every turn, according to Diana Billings, one of the primary consultants on the project. Billings and Franklin pored over the land use documents at Tuesday's lengthy public hearing for the benefit of the county officials and citizens -- many of them realtors -- in the audience.

The county's existing comprehensive plan was adopted in 1993. One only has to recall recent issues of residential development in rural areas or the feedlot crisis of the mid-1990s or the concern over demolition landfills in the county to know how far-ranging land use issues are and how important the proper "building blocks" can be to citizens.

According to Billings, many of the highlights of the three documents -- all recommended for approval by the Mower County Planning Commission and the citizens task force that reviewed them earlier -- are mere formalities, involving new definitions.

There is more clarity of residential development standards and their maximum base densities. They include one unit per 160 acres in the agriculture district or the same as the current density; one unit in the new rural management district; and one unit per 20 acres for the urban expansion district, which had no density level.

Also new is the density transfer provisions, which allow all or part of the density on a tract (or tracts) of land to be located typically only within a single tract or among contiguous parcels in common ownership.

According to Billings and Franklin, there are also new lot standards and siting criteria to guide development.

The county's feedlot ordinance was reworded and the language restructured, but the requirements remain unchanged.

The size of the Mower County Board of Adjustment has been changed from four members plus an alternate to five members with no alternates.

The agricultural district's requirements remain essentially unchanged. However, the rural management district is a new district with a density of 1:40.

The urban/rural expansion was also revised in limited fashion, according to Billings and Franklin. One of the provisions is new and expanding feedlots have been added to the district's conditional uses, but the feedlot has been limited to 50 animal units.

The freeway interchange management district is new and focuses on the Dexter-Grand Meadow-Elkton area.

Also new is the planned unit development district which allows flexibility from typical lot sizes and other development standards to achieve development that is more sensitive to

the land and surroundings.

The adult entertainment uses ordinance satisfied increased concerns over the appropriate location of such businesses within the county.

Throughout the task force review and county Planning Commission's own public hearing, Billings and Franklin have called the changes largely "housekeeping changes."

Bill Buckley, county environmental health services director, was present to also answer questions.

Sitting through the entire three-hour public hearing process was Patrick A. Oman, the Mower County Attorney, who frequently was called upon to interpret the legal implications of the new land use ordinance.

Still to be clarified and especially for the county's realtors is the segment of the new zoning ordinance concerning individual sewage treatment systems that must be in compliance when the property title is transferred.

One of the realtors, Art Hollerud, also said the success of enforcing the requirement was dependent upon compliance inspections by the county.

As one of the realtors, Joe Fuhrman, remarked,

"We need to know where we stand."