On January 12th, the Pittsford Village Board of Trustees convened for a four-hour session during the weekend to review an updated version of our Village’s Code. I attended, and was not extremely surprised that I got one of the best seats in the house.

As I have mentioned before, I very much appreciate the dedication of our Trustees for spending the time to review these documents in order to improve our village government. When we talk about reducing legal fees and getting what we want as a community in terms of planned development, this is exactly the kind of activity that needs to receive the most attention.

Many suggestions were made by the trustees during the session to clarify and strengthen the code. One suggestion in particular, though, stood out to me as being a step back: Trustee Keating suggested removing the word “morals” from §210-10.3, where it previously read, “The provisions of this Chapter shall be held to be the minimum requirements adopted for the promotion of the public health, safety, morals and general welfare and the conservation of property values throughout the Village of Pittsford.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his famous, “I Have a Dream,” speech during the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington.

It strikes me that especially on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we should be mindful that our laws aspire to codify the morals that we hold most strongly as a community, including those that help to achieve a just, equal and free society. In other municipalities, including our Town of Pittsford, this word is featured in similar sections of their code, so even though the word has a long history in law (it appears in foundational cases for zoning like Euclid v. Ambler in 1926) it is not necessarily anachronistic today.

If nothing else, it was not clear to me from Trustee Keating’s reasoning at the meeting why we would remove this word, which has been present in prior versions of our own Village Code.

Especially given the recent history of our village in incurring large amounts of legal fees due to ambiguity in code, we should be very careful about a number of the proposed omissions of words that we are making. I believe that we should have a code that is strong, and which is also aspirational in terms of moral values that we hold deeply as a community. I hope that by bringing issues like this to discussion, we can help to ensure that our code remains strong to best support our community in Pittsford Village.

What are your thoughts? Should we leave the word “morals” in our code?