Proposed zoning codes for Lawrence didn’t look simpler than the old codes Wednesday to Jere McElhaney.

McElhaney, a Douglas County commissioner, looked at the hefty book containing the new codes and started questioning.

“This is about 200 pages front and back,” he said during a joint study session of the Douglas County Commission and Lawrence City Commission. “Are there plans to make it simpler? It seems like we’re governing too much.”

Planning Director Linda Finger said the revised codes, while hefty, were simpler than current codes adopted in 1967. Summaries of the main sections are being prepared to explain the new rules to the public, she said.

“The problem with making it simpler is it takes more pages,” Finger said.

“Is that what the consultant says?” McElhaney said. “Maybe you need to find a new consultant.”

Planners and consultants have been working on the codes more than two years. The new regulations will reflect policies in Horizon 2020, the city-county comprehensive plan, better than current regulations, Finger said. For instance, the proposed regulations include new zoning districts for open space and smaller single-family lots that will allow for cheaper housing.

“We can’t implement Horizon 2020 correctly because we don’t have the tools” with the current regulations, Finger said.

McElhaney, though, was concerned the new codes would be burdensome to developers and government officials in charge of enforcing them.

“I know our intentions are good and well, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But I don’t know if we’ve gone overboard and tried to do too much.”

Mayor David Dunfield, an architect, said, “I’ve worked with a lot of zoning codes in my professional work. None of them are particularly easy to deal with. That’s the nature of the beast.”

Douglas County Commissioner Charles Jones agreed.

“It is a lot to swallow, but I think the structure is better,” Jones said. “If you do this every 37 years, it’s almost impossible to make an incremental change. I don’t think there’s any easy way to do it, given the time gap.”

But Jones agreed that Finger’s summaries were needed to explain the new rules to the public.

“I think you have to facilitate reasonable discussion in the community,” Jones said. “If you hand this document to people in the community, they’re not going to be able to wrap their heads around it.”

Officials said they would have public meetings to discuss the proposed codes in further detail.