City ordinances prohibiting rock placement in boulevards and restricting driveway widths will get a closer look by the Minot City Council in the near future. The council on Monday approved the drafting of ordinance amendments after receiving an outline of the Engineering Department’s proposed changes.

City Engineer Lance Meyer said the city discontinued allowing loose landscaping rock rather than vegetation on boulevards in 2022. The prohibition on new locations has been difficult to enforce because of the presence of previous rock landscaping allowed to remain in place, he said.

“When we sat down and talked about it, we weren’t really having probably enough problems to justify the cost and staff time to enforce this,” Meyer said. The preferred option, he said, is to allow rock boulevards, but in event of landscaping damage, such as from snowplows or road reconstruction, the city would add soil and seed, or the landowner could choose to incur the expense of restoring the rocks.

Another ordinance change would increase the driveway widths for commercial driveways from 35 feet to 40 feet to match industrial driveways. Wider driveways would be permitted if shown to be necessary to accommodate truck trailers.

The proposal for residential driveway width, which now is limited to 40 feet, is to allow an option for driveways of up to 50% of the lot frontage.

The proposal comes after the city received two requests for wider driveways this past year. Meyer said the new language allows the wider driveways to be analyzed for safety and permitted administratively, requiring homeowners to appeal to the council only in cases that can’t be approved administratively.

In other business, the council approved the purchase of an incinerator to burn tree waste at the landfill. The incinerator would meet state air quality standards.

The landfill receives more than 4,000 tons of tree waste on average each year, according to staff information provided to the council. The North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality will no longer issue air quality variances for burning, preferring shredding trees for reuse.

The cost of a shredder is $900,000, the council memo stated. Hiring the shredding done would cost about $138,000 a year.

The landfill uses wood chips during wet weather operations and other projects. Chips are available for free for residential use, but the landfill reports little interest. Ninety percent of wood chips end up as alternative daily landfill cover, which staff report is not cost effective.

The $234,409 cost of an incinerator would come from advancing dollars budgeted for next year. The plan approved by the council is to buy the same model as West Fargo purchased last May. The City of Minot will be able to piggyback off the information compiled by West Fargo in its state permit application, saving $12,000 in consulting fees.