In a 5-4 motion, Lexington County Council approved removing the school concurrency questionnaire sent out to all the Lexington County school districts. The motion was made during the Oct. 28 council committee meeting and was the last item on the agenda to review before adjourning.

Concurrency is a shorthand expression for a set of land use regulations that local governments adopt to ensure that adequate public services are available to support the new development, according to Lexington County’s website.

Lexington County is the first county in the state to use concurrency requirements for residential use. As stated in the policy, current concurrency standards require prior formal approval of land use activities as it relates to five items. These five items include law enforcement, fire services, EMS, solid waste management and public schools. Other states that use concurrency in some form or fashion include North Carolina, Florida and Maryland.

For the public schools, a questionnaire was sent to each school district in the county. The schools also receive data from the county.

Those who voted to remove the school questionnaire include Todd Cullum, Glen Conwell, Clifford Fisher, Michael Bishop and Todd Cockrell. Those who voted against the removal were Darrell Hudson, Beth Carrigg, Charli Wessinger and Larry Brigham.

Council went back and forth over the effectiveness of the questionnaire; Wessinger suggested gathering input from the schools and looking at elementary and middle school numbers versus high school numbers.

"I don’t like us making decisions saying we are going to turn [a housing development request] down because the school says they're full. I think it will end up costing taxpayers money when we get sued," Cockrell said. "Right now, we are kind of an island with concurrency, and if we get sued, that’s taxpayer money.”

The concurrency proposal was passed in June 2024 after its first reading of two ordinances in October 2023. The concurrency ordinance is still in place; however, the questionnaire from public schools has been removed.