The City of Early issued the following press release Wednesday:

In February of 2020, the City of Early Administration began embarking on a 16-month journey to rebuild the City’s development code. For several hours every Tuesday and Thursday, the City Administrator, Assistant City Administrator, Code Enforcer and Public Works Director, met with one another to discuss every avenue of development in order to create a code that was easy to follow, accessible to all and beneficial to the future growth of Early. Along with several public hearings and City Council meetings, the City of Early believes that this new development code explores all avenues and gives clear code for developers to follow.

Now, in June of 2021, the new Development Code is completed and will soon be adopted by the council on June 22, 2021. 

The City of Early consulted with Kendig Keast to develop this new development code. Kendig Keast is a multidisciplinary planning consultancy composed of seasoned professionals who specialize in assisting towns, cities and counties envision, prepare for, and implement their community’s preferred future. 

Kendig Keast Collaborative (“KKC”) focuses on providing exemplary service to their clients and ensuring the direct involvement of firm principals on all projects. They offer a breadth of team resources spanning multiple disciplines, including certified planners (AICP), economic development specialists (CEcD), land use attorneys (Esq), GIS specialists, landscape architects (RLA) and urban designers, and graphic communications designers.

It’s a daunting task to re-create the city’s development code, but it’s something that needed to be done in order to ensure Early’s future growth and increase in quality of life. We are so excited to see how this new development code will impact the city and believe that developers will appreciate the ease in finding certain sections within the code. 

The new code can be found by going to this link. There you will see how you can click through the table of contents to reach any section of the development code without having to search for hours as with our previous code. This is something that we believe will help keep future developers interested in Early since reading through the development code is one of the first encounters with the city that they will have. One way that this helps the City of Early is the thinking that if the development code is seamless and easy to navigate, then the rest of the process in bringing a developer’s business to Early should be just as seamless. Thus, increasing our likelihood of gaining some nice new businesses.