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The LaGrange City Council has approved four text amendments to the city’s Unified Development Ordinance.

The first change modifies permitted and prohibited uses to allow data processing hosting and related services within general industrial and agribusiness zoning.

Currently, the ordinance only allows data processing hosting in corridor mixed-use, activity center mixed-use and campus general business.

During initial discussions of the potential change in April, City Planner Mark Kostial said data processing centers are an ideal fit for the industrial and agribusiness zoning designation. The change was also recommended by the planning commission.

Another change will modify how the city defines extended-stay hotels and motels.

The city previously defined extended stays as hotels and motels that have 10 or more sleeping rooms used for temporary occupancy of transients and contain cooking facilities in more than 50% of the individual rooms.

The new definition proposed by the planning commission would define extended-stay hotels/motels as:

“A hotel or motel containing 10 or more guest rooms intended or designed to be used, or which are used, rented, or hired out to be occupied, or which are occupied for sleeping purposes for guests and contain kitchen facilities for food preparation including but not limited to such facilities as refrigerators, stoves, and ovens.”

The change was made to prevent circumventing the designation by limiting kitchens in rooms to fewer than 50 percent.

The third and fourth proposed amendments would modify distance requirements for daycares and warehouses.

Currently, the UDO requires that child daycare facilities be at least 1,000 feet away from any other daycare facility.

The issue was recently discovered when a proposed daycare on Whitesville Road was blocked because it’s too close to an existing daycare on Fannin Street.

City staff and the planning commission unanimously recommended striking the requirement from the UDO.

The city also modified distance requirements for warehouses within the UDO. The code previously required warehouses to be at least 1,500 feet from one another as measured from property line to property line.

Kostial explained that the intent behind that language was specifically associated with warehousing via special use permit. The modified language in the code will only apply the distance requirement when a special-use permit is required.

All four text amendments were unanimously recommended by the planning commission.