During last night’s Charlotte City Council meeting, a hearing was held on Rezoning Petition 2025-118, also known as the Fall 2025 Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) Maintenance Text Amendment. This amendment was filed in October and has been amended as it has progressed through the adoption process.
Here’s a quick summary of this latest proposed amendment to the UDO:
What does this amendment do? This text amendment provides greater clarity, updates definitions, updates graphics, adjusts use permissions and prescribed conditions, makes some changes and additions to development standards, updates administrative process language, and corrects scrivener’s errors.
Why was this proposed? The UDO went into effect on June 1, 2023. Periodic updates are required to maintain the UDO as a “living document”. Staff has identified changes to improve the ordinance for users and to better align with desired outcomes. This proposed text amendment includes many of those identified changes.
Where can I read what is proposed? In this proposed text amendment, the red underlined text shows added wording, and the red strike-through text shows deleted wording. Red underlined text or red strike-through text with yellow highlighting indicates changes made since the original filing on October 15, 2025. Red underlined text or red strike-through text with cyan highlighting indicates changes made since the updated filing on December 15, 2025. Click here to view the amended proposed text amendment.
What impact does this have? This text amendment improves the functionality of the UDO and helps implement and support the goals and policies of the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan.
What is the schedule? City staff held two virtual information sessions on this proposed text amendment on January 6, 2026, and on January 8, 2026. A decision on the proposed text amendment is anticipated on March 23, 2026.
Video from the Charlotte City Council meeting
My Take: This amendment helps to provide more clarity to a document that has seen many changes from its inception more than two and a half years ago. I do think these incremental moves have been helpful, but the bigger, more policy driven adjustments are likely to be included in the next round. That means I really need your help in identifying the big remaining “pain points” within the ordinance. With that, we’ll be looking for proposed solutions we can convey to staff and elected officials. If we are presented with intel on the challenges, along with multiple solutions, then we can make our case for bigger changes.
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