Lebanon — Several changes to Lebanon’s zoning ordinance are being proposed this month, as city planners look to encourage development downtown and make minor fixes to existing rules.

The City Council on Wednesday will take up plans to increase the building height in Lebanon’s downtown neighborhoods, during its annual review of city regulations.

They’ll also discuss eight other zoning amendments, including proposals that would allow for larger business signage and change the city’s definition of a “family.”

Unlike past years where the city proposed rezoning entire neighborhoods, this year’s changes are relatively minor and can be decided by the City Council, according to a memo from Lebanon’s planning office. However, councilors can choose to place any of the amendments on the March ballot. 

The most significant change on the council’s plate is a proposal to set 55 feet as the maximum building height in Lebanon’s central business districts, which are located in the heart of downtown and West Lebanon.

The maximum is currently set at 45 feet, but developers and the business community have long worried the limit discourages new projects. Calls to reconsider building height were also brought forward in the Downtown Visioning Study, which encouraged officials to “considering increasing the maximum allowable buildable height.”

Planners had considered a 65-foot maximum height, which would have been available to developers through a Planning Board review. But they decided to hold off on that proposal, after the board worried that limit could be too high.

The amendments also include a proposal to move two city-owned properties in West Lebanon into the central business district so that they can be used for office space.

The city hopes to turn the dilapidated building at 3 Seminary Hill into the Recreation and Parks Department’s main office, and rezoning that parcel along with nearby 5 South Main St. could prevent the city from having to obtain a special exception needed to operate in a residential district.

The plan was met with opposition from the Planning Board, which worries  that permanently zoning the property could create traffic issues, if the city ever sold it. But councilors rejected that notion during a meeting earlier this month.

“It’s such a tiny, postage stamp lot that even in the CBD, from a practical standpoint, what you can do with it is severely limited,” said Assistant Mayor Tim McNamara in an audio recording of the meeting.

“I just don’t see the risk that maybe they’re seeing there,” he added. “I think that CBD opens up the opportunity if at some point the city doesn’t need it, that it could be what it has been in the past, which is a very nice office for an outside firm.”

The city is also considering an amendment to its sign regulations that would allow for potentially larger signage in Lebanon.

When the city adopted its new sign regulations last year, it set a maximum sign area limitation of 200 square feet per building. But officials quickly found that was too restrictive, especially to businesses hoping for larger signs on the Route 12A corridor, according to the planning memo.

On the other hand, they also discovered that another rule basing the size of signs on distance from the property line produced signs that appeared too large.

As a compromise, planners propose going back to calculating sign size based on a building’s frontage to the road, similar to the prior practice.

“All in all, we think that this gets much closer to where we’re comfortable with as a community in terms of how much signage you actually see,” Zoning Administrator Tim Corwin told the City Council during its meeting last week.

Also on the agenda is a change to how the city defines “family,” which is now determined as “one person or any number of persons related by blood, adoption, marriage or by civil union or not more than three persons not related by blood, adoption, marriage or civil union.”

Only one family can occupy a dwelling unit, according to the zoning ordinance, meaning no more are allowed in a single-family home, half of a duplex, a townhouse or apartment.

But the current rule prohibits any non-related person from living with people who are related, according to the planning memo.

That means a husband and wife could not rent out a room to a college student or hire a live-in caretaker.

To better allow for more living situations, the city hopes to change the ordinance to allow related people to live with “up to two unrelated individuals.”

The City Council is scheduled to take up the zoning amendments during a public hearing at 7 p.m. on Wednesday at City Hall.

Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com or 603-727-3223.