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8 missing, or are ineligible due to conflict of interest. The City’s Attorney should be consulted in these cases to ensure that the proper voting requirements have been met. It should be noted that for the Planning Commission, no super-majority vote comes into play. As an advisory board, the Commission passes on its recommendation by simple majority vote. It is important to remember that zoning amendments are adopted by enactment of a new ordinance. This includes both text amendments and rezonings of property. The City needs to put the proposed amendment in the form of an ordinance, adopt it by the required vote, then publish it as with any other ordinance before it becomes effective. Challenges . Zoning amendments are occasionally litigated. The standard of review is “rational basis”, and the basis Cities should rely on is direction from the Comprehensive Plan. The factors listed above, and the quality of the record documenting the proposal’s consistency with those factors, will often be determinative in legal disputes involving rezoning requests. As a rule, the City has broad discretion to consider zoning patterns, and their relationship to the Comprehensive Plan. Conditional Use Permits Conditional Use - A type of land use in a particular district which is presumed to be allowed, but requires special, additional standards and review due to the existence of some aspect of the use which may create a nuisance or place an extraordinary burden on public services. Conditional Use Permits, once granted, are considered to be permanent, without need for renewal, so long as the conditions applied to the permit are maintained. A Conditional Use Permit may be transferred to other persons, again as long as they continue to meet the original conditions. The exception to this “permanence” is when the use lapses for more than one year. In that case, the property must apply for a new CUP if they wish to reinstate the use. Disputes . Conditional Use Permits are, by far, the most commonly litigated zoning matter. Whereas the development of Comprehensive Plans allows the City to exercise the most discretion, Conditional Use Permits allow, typically, the least. The general standard for the City is that if the conditions are met by the permittee, the City has very little discretion to deny the CUP request. Moreover, conditions must be rationally related to the impacts created by the proposed use. Basis of R eview . The Zoning Ordinance applies two sets of conditions in the review of any Conditional Use Permit application - general conditions applying to all CUPs which serve as the basis for findings of approval or denial, and specific conditions listed with each individual use in the Zoning Ordinance district section. The first set of conditions is as follows: