Property Owners Denounce Discriminatory Deeds

In April, the County passed 2024 OA-23 to bring conditional use permit (CUP) consideration process into compliance with state law. OA-23 redefines the town role in the CUP process in a significant way. The main changes include:

• The County is legally responsible for CUP decisions. If/when a CUP decision is appealed, the county will be responsible to defend the decision in court.
• Towns still review/act on CUPs. While the formal decision to approve or deny a CUP now rests with the County Zoning and Land Regulation Committee (ZLR), Towns will still review and take action on CUPs, and the ZLR is required to weigh Town recommendations when making their decision. Towns can also choose to not take action on a CUP proposal.
• No formal public hearing requirement. Towns no longer need to publish a Class 2 notice, hold a public hearing, or have joint Plan Commission/Town Board meetings prior to considering a CUP application. CUPs can now be considered at regularly scheduled and properly noticed meetings.

Because a standard for granting a CUP is consistency with the town comprehensive plan, planning staff recommend Towns update their Comprehensive Plans to address CUPs, if they don’t already. Recent local examples include:

• Town of Dunn Comprehensive-Plan: Lists factors to consider for CUP requests, standard conditions of approval, and which conditional uses are reasonably consistent with their Comp Plan.
• Cross Plains Comprehensive Plan: Specific conditional uses are listed in the plan as being inappropriate in certain areas of the town that have significant public investment to acquire and preserve natural resources.
• Town of Primrose Comprehensive Plan: Contains policies for certain conditional uses (ex. solar fields).

Please contact county staff with questions about OA-23, or if you’d like assistance in updating your comprehensive plan to address CUPs. 

Planning Assistant Duha Jamal is applying machine learning techniques to program digital elevation models to identify potential effigy mounds in Dane County. She uses elevation sensitive imagery of known effigies and mounds to “train” the machine learning model on what elevation changes and the shapes to look for. The program then lists and highlights as a potential historic cultural site.

The project goal is to integrate both known and newly identified effigy mounds into the County digital geographic database and continuously train the model so that it can detect and pinpoint additional sites that may contain burial mounds and effigies throughout Dane County. Once the model is trained, Duha can run the model and review the findings to determine if mounds are present or recommend further field research to confirm the locations.

Image: Aerial elevation sensitive image of known mounds.

Planning & Development is hosting a Boys and Girls Club intern for 6 weeks over the summer. The Boys and Girls Club Career Partners program gives students the opportunity to be matched up with the department to learn more about jobs in government, planning, zoning and land records.

This year Ana, a first-year landscape architecture student at UW-Madison, will be working with us. Ana will learn about all three divisions, attend meetings, and contribute to an ongoing project. We look forward to sharing our knowledge and working with Ana.

Past interns include Irene, Ousman, Claudia, Hipolito, Daniel, and Abea. These interns have contributed to past projects such as mapping deed restrictions and discriminatory documents and mapping a community’s land use inventory. You can find out more information about the program and past Career Partners at 2025 Summer Internships - Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County.