Last year, the Town of Marion contracted with General Code to perform a codification of the Marion bylaws. This is an intensive review of the bylaws as published on the Town website. The review looks for misspellings, the use of wrong words, grammatical mistakes, incomplete thoughts, lack of definitions, conflicts with other sections of the bylaws, and verification that bylaw changes accurately reflect what was approved at Town Meeting and agreed to by the Attorney General. A list of existing mistakes was provided to General Code.
General Code’s task was to provide a proposed logical reorganization of the bylaws and a list of additional questions. General Code delivered those first two products on November 11, 2016. There are over 280 additional questions; the Town Administrator and the bylaw working group resolved about 200 of the minor changes. These resolutions and the proposed reorganization were approved by the Planning Board and returned to General Code.
General Code has provided a red-lined final draft of the reorganized bylaws. The red-lined version shows all the changes other than the reorganization. An electronic copy will be available on the Town website, and hard copies will be available at the Clerk’s office, the Building Commissioner’s office, the Planning Board office, Elizabeth Taber Library and the Police Station. Residents are encouraged to review the final red-lined draft.
A public Q&A session will be held on Thursday, April 20 at 7:00 pm at the Music Hall. The meeting is to educate the voting public prior to Town Meeting. Please remember that we will be reviewing a transformation of the current bylaws to a more logical configuration with simple corrections.
There is an Article for the Spring Town Meeting to approve the bylaw reorganization along with the initial batch of resolved questions. The bylaw working group has been occupied with the more complex questions; the goal is to have most of the remaining questions resolved for Fall Town Meeting. We expect some questions along with Master Plan implementations will be addressed next year.