Request By:
Honorable Dale T. Wilson
Vincent and Skees
Attorneys at Law
West Building
240 Main Street
Florence, Kentucky 41042
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Walter C. Herdman, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
This is in answer to your letter of August 17, in which you raise a question concerning the adequacy of the legal description required for notices of proposed zoning changes. You relate that currently the planning commission requires the applicant for a zoning change to provide a detailed legal description from a recent survey or deed of the property involved, and these survey type legal descriptions have proven to be very lengthy on occasion resulting in a substantial expense for their publication in the newspaper.
KRS 100.211 requires a hearing on the part of the planning commission in response to any request for a zoning change and notice thereof must be given pursuant to KRS Chapter 424. In addition, KRS 100.212 requires that individual notice must be given by certified mail to all owners of adjoining property as well as the posting of the notice on the property itself. We find, however, no requirement under KRS Chapter 100, particularly the referred to statutes, concerning the contents of the notice. Under the publication act, pursuant to which notice must be published, KRS 424.140 pertaining to the contents of the advertisements required to be published, simply provides the following:
"(1) Any advertisement of a hearing, meeting or examination shall state the time, place and purpose of the same." (Emphasis added.)
Referring to McQuillin, Municipal Corporations, Vol. 8A, § 25.249, pertaining to notice requirements for zoning purposes, we quote the following excerpts:
"Notice of a zoning ordinance or amendment or of hearings thereon generally must be given where and as required, and the ordinance or amendment is invalid for failure to give required notice. The notice must be sufficient and a zoning ordinance or an amendment thereof may be invalid for failure to give sufficient notice. The notice must adequately inform as to what changes are proposed, and the actual change must conform substantially to the proposed changes in the notice. Some deviation from the proposed changes may be immaterial."
"A notice has been said to be sufficient if it gives the average reader reasonable warning that property in which he has an interest may be affected by the proposed zoning legislation, and affords him an opportunity by the exercise of reasonable diligence to determine whether such is the fact. However, notice substantially complying with the requirements is usually considered sufficient and minor defects are disregarded where they have not prejudiced interested persons."
Under the circumstances, we find no legal requirement that the commission publish in its notice of a proposed zoning change the legal description of the property in the detail you have indicated to be the current practice, unless the commission has so required pursuant to its rules and regulations enacted under KRS 100.167. As pointed out in McQuillin, it is sufficient if the notice gives the average newspaper reader reasonable warning that the property has been requested to be rezoned. In other words, a brief, concise description of the location of the property and the purpose of the hearing, as well as the time and place of the hearing, as required under KRS 424.140, would appear to be legally sufficient notice.