ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Since its founding nearly two years ago, the Belmont County Planning Commission has been hard at work reviewing subdivision regulations and determining how best to update them.

Now it close to putting forward a proposed new set of regulations.

On Wednesday, the Belmont County Board of Commissioners reappointed three planning commission board members for three-year terms: Ohio Department of Transportation engineer Jim Graham, former Powhatan Point mayor Mark McVey and Pultney Township Trustee Frank Schaffer. The other members are realtor Jay Goodman, surveyor A.J. Smith and contractor John Jefferis, who serve two-year terms. Civil engineer Brian May and attorney Richard Myser serve one-year terms. The county commissioners — Josh Meyer, J.P. Dutton and Jerry Echemann — are also on the board.

Shaffer said the board’s work is proceeding and will help Belmont County move “into the future.”

“We’ve staggered those terms in the beginning in order to be able to make them come out in different years on different ones,” he said. “There’s always going to be new terms coming up every so many years, and they’re not all coming up at once where we can lose a full board.”

Afterward, Shaffer spoke about the board’s progress.

“We are very close to presenting something to the commissioners and holding hearings for the subdivision regulations,” he said. “We’re hoping to have it wrapped up hopefully before the end of the year. I don’t know how soon before the end of the year at this present time.”

After work on the new updated subdivision regulations is complete, public hearings will be scheduled to explain the changes. The commissioners will then consider approving the new regulations.

“What this will do, this will put a little bit of rules and regulations in place when they build subdivisions in Belmont County. We need road drainage, base thickness of roads, what the finished product of the road needs to be, and some rules establishing basic subdivisions and residential subdivisions,” Shaffer said.

He said the current regulations are too “vague.”

“And sometimes leaves the local entities hooked with a bill to fix things after the fact,” he said.

Shaffer said board members had to review the current regulations.

“There’s a lot of tedious things to update from 1962 to now. There’s a lot of tedious restrictions we had to look at for today’s development,” Shaffer said.

“The past two years is basically putting together a little stricter regulations for the developers and the townships and the municipalities,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of rules, and we get into a lot of issues with those old rules. This is to stop that and put a little bit of a uniform, stricter position on the subdivisions.”

Next will come the issue of reviewing new projects and enforcing the subdivision regulations.

“We’ve been recently working to try to get a diretor,” he said, adding the commission is looking at a prospective director. “We have a person we would like to be the director. We’re using him as a consultant at the present time to clear up the loose ends.”

Shaffer said the prospective director is Lance Shultz of Shadyside.

“This is the direction that the board wants to go at this stage,” he said. “We’ll have the director in place hopefully to lead the board in those directions so if a developer comes into the area, he will have the exact rules and regulations in front of him and work with the director to be able to move forward.”