The City of Merritt is looking to clean up confusing rules for multi-family construction.

Planning and development services manager Mark Brodrick says one request from city staff is to entirely remove content in the Official Community Plan about density.

“It’s a bit problematic, because of two reasons. Number one, the OCP normally looks at things from a broad, higher-up, strategic type of perspective. And the numbers, the densities expressed in the OCP, conflict with what’s in the zoning bylaw.”

The city is also asking to update a zoning bylaw about residential units above commercial businesses. Brodrick says the current bylaw allows one or three-or-more units, but not two, to be above commercial businesses in C2 commercial zones.

Since being elected mayor last fall, mayor Linda Brown has repeatedly mentioned a priority being to review development processes, leading up to these recommendations from city staff, which will go before city council tonight.

“We’re trying to clean things up as we go,” Brodrick says. “Where there could’ve been possible issues, is we have a reasonable number of applications or interested parties in building multi-family. So the density provisions in the OCP were making it difficult to comply with the zoning. So we’re trying to remove the confusion, make it clear.”