City moves forward with codifying ordinances

After solving a major outstanding concern, the Sundance City Council has decided to move ahead with codifying its ordinances: the process of cleaning them up into a format that can be published as a book and, in this case, made available in a searchable database online.

The council received a presentation from Municode, a company that specializes in codification, at April’s regular meeting. However, a decision was delayed due to one stumbling block: the possibility that reorganizing the ordinances and possibly changing their numbers and titles, as well as making changes to remove redundancies and inconsistencies, could legally require the city to publish the entire code book all over again in the newspaper.

“That’s a monumental task,” said City Attorney Mark Hughes at the time. Not only would it be a big expense, he questioned whether there would even be room in the newspaper to publish the entire set of city ordinances.

At May’s regular meeting, Clerk-Treasurer Kathy Lenz told the council she had been in contact with other communities who have made use of the Municode service. They solved this problem, she said, by publishing an ordinance that addressed the new numbering and titling.

The council passed a motion to proceed with the service and for Mayor Paul Brooks to sign a contract with Municode for its basic package. At a cost of $10,800, this will involve a 12-month project in which Municode experts will pore over the existing ordinances to check they are up to federal and state standards and check for inconsistencies and irregularities.

Once complete, the ordinances will be re-arranged in a logical format and published as a physical book and in an online database.

Municode also provides a supplementation service to keep the code up to date, as well as additional optional services. The council decided to consider these possibilities further down the line and proceed only with the initial review at this time.