County ordinances available online
By Steve Herring
Published in News on June 28, 2011 1:46 PM
People who need to look up a county ordinance don't have to go any farther than their computer. After years of discussion and planning, the county has finally made an electronic version of the ordinances available online.
"You can go to any ordinance, pull it up and you can read those," County Manager Lee Smith told commissioners last week. "You can see the dates that they were changed. You can make copies and print them out.
"It is something that we have been working on for a number of years not only at the behest of citizens, departments and commissioners to codify and organize our ordinances."
The ordinances are online at waynegov.com where people can click on a link on the home page to navigate to them.
"Unless they have an extremely slow (Internet) service people should be able to pull them up to view," he said.
Commissioners in April held a public hearing on codifying the ordinances -- which simply means they were collected and organized in a manner similar to the way state laws are recorded. Prior to that time each ordinance stood on its own.
The county will maintain one large bound printed copy of the ordinances. However, placing the information online reduces cost since the books are expensive and are outdated as soon as an ordinance is changed, Smith said.
A book can cost hundreds of dollars, he said.
It will be easier to update the online version, Smith said. It is expected to be updated a couple of times a year and it will be marked on the ordinances when they change, Smith said.
The chapters of the code have been arranged in alphabetical order and there are catch lines for each chapter section for ease of use by readers.
Related sections of the code are tied together by notes which also refer to relevant state law.
A table listing the state law citations and their location within the code is included at the end of the ordinances.
The site is searchable and includes buttons to e-mail, save and print.