PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Ordinance Review Committee was thanked for its "tremendous" amount of work to update the city code.

"You don't realize that something is dated until you see someone rewrite the same thing in a different way so I appreciate you updating the language to be a bit more present," Ward 5 Councilor Patrick Kavey said during a joint meeting of the committee and the subcommittee on Ordinances and Rules last week.

Since September 2022, the committee has worked to rid the code of outdated language, typos, duplications, and conflicts — including the addition of gender-neutral language throughout.

This is required by the city charter every five years.

"We updated some of the processes that were outlined in the city code to reflect how they're actually being executed now. We also moved all of the fines and fees into one central location. Fines are in [Chapter] 4.5, fees are in 24 so someone reading the code could easily pick something out if they were looking for it. There were some conflicts between the individual chapters and those sections so that would be cleared up," Chair Jody Phillips explained.

"A couple of the other high-level things that we did is we incorporated gender-neutral language throughout the code, we standardized the annual reporting period for the departments, and just went through and tried to resolve some of the conflicts between the different chapters of the code."

General Code Corp., which provides the city's codification services, conducted an editorial legal analysis.

The subcommittee suggested a couple of edits on the redlined city code and those will be brought back to the full City Council. The document with all approved revisions will then be forwarded to General Code, which will apply blanket formatting, and a draft recodification ordinance will be prepared and submitted to the council for ordainment.