What color should Main Street be? Fort Mill may pick how properties paint the town.

Plans to paint the town? One may bring the swatches.

Fort Mill leaders are looking at whether the town needs a set list of colors for the Main Street and other historic areas. The town historic review board asked planners to bring back options for consideration. There isn’t a scheduled decision yet.

The idea is by approving a color scheme, property owners in the historic district who now have to come to the review board for exterior painting jobs wouldn’t — as long as they pick something from the pre-approved palette.

“We did like the idea of having a designated palette,” said LeAnne Morse, part of the seven-member citizen review board. “A person who was painting their house or business could look at that and see very easily what options were available.”

The town’s historic district dates back to 1988. More than 70 properties fall within it, including homes, churches, businesses and even a road. All but two fall within town limits. Many homes and the Main Street area as a district are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Businesses routinely come to the review board to discuss exterior work, including paint. Homes are a little different.

“The houses in the historic district present a little different challenge than the businesses,” Morse said. “Someone may want to add a new color where they may always have been white or they may always have been gray, or whatever.”

Review boards typically try to go with the same, or at least similar, colors to what was on a building at least as far back as anyone can document. They lean toward historic styles. But, Morse said, a new color scheme wouldn’t necessarily limit potential painters.

“The idea of have an established pallet is to help the property owners,” she said. “It gives them some suggestions and ideas that they might not have considered. There might be a wider range of options than they think.”

Town planners brought and the historic board reviewed similar efforts in Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia. Communities with set schemes vary on how many options they allow, and on what surfaces.

Barnstable, Mass., has 48 shades in Colonial, Victorian and Arts and Crafts styles. Richmond, Va., has up to 20 shades for each of its styles and surfaces, broken down to which paint can be used for brick versus wood, shutters, doors and the like.

“The point of it is to adopt an objective standard to ease the burden on the property owner,” Morse said. “They might be surprised at how many colors are on there. It’s not just a token handful of things. It has a lot of variety.”

If Fort Mill does adopt a color scheme, the town will have to look well outside the area for examples. Municipalities vary when it comes to historic review boards. Clover doesn’t have one. Tega Cay as a city isn’t as old as some boards in neighboring areas.

Rock Hill has an historic review board dating back to 1989. The board reviews and recommends properties for historic districts, state or national historic designation lists. It also advises property owners looking to preserve, renovate, rehabilitate or reuse historic properties.

That board doesn’t have a paint palette.

“We don’t review color for the historic properties,” said Janice Miller, city planner who works with the seven-member board. “As long as they’re maintained, that’s all we really look for.”

The city has six districts and almost two dozen individual historic sites. It isn’t one large area with defined boundaries. Historic districts can be anywhere a large concentration of historic properties exists. Often, property owners there want to maintain a sense of history, which can mean questions on the best paint colors.

“They usually ask us for recommendations, but we don’t have a list (of colors),” Miller said. “I encourage color. I like it.”

At its most recent meeting the review board in Rock Hill went over a lengthy list of guideline changes. Most of them are relatively minor and none of them involve adding a paint scheme. The updates guidelines are, like the Fort Mill change, intended to make updates to historic properties easier.

Photos of historic property upgrades rather than diagrams, for instance, will be part of the guideline changes in Rock Hill.

“We find that people are more responsive when they can actually go and see,” Miller said.

York has a board of architectural review, looking at everything from signage to new construction in its historic district. In February, city manager Lisa Wallace sent a letter to historic property owners with information on what’s required to make exterior changes, but also on a new ordinance creating a financial incentive for rehabilitating properties.

Similar rules in Fort Mill have been key, developers stated, in the many new restaurants and other businesses filling up the downtown there the past few years.

Wallace wrote it’s “as challenging as it is rewarding” owning an historic home, but city guidelines in York are useful.

“This process is designed to protect and preserve the character and heritage of these historic buildings,” she wrote.

The architectural review board in York has say over a wide range of improvements, and won’t issue approvals unless they meet “the character, appearance and environment” of the district.

The board in York doesn’t list a color palette.

The city of Chester has an historic preservation committee. Recent items to come to that group involve modernizing properties, from questions on solar panels to communications antennae for emergency response. The group reviews and can approve or disapprove any structure in the city’s historic district or any outside the district designated as historic.

In addition to jurisdiction on anything built, altered, relocated or demolished in the historic district, the committee has say on anything that alters the “exterior architectural character” of such a building.

Lancaster County has its own historical commission, but it more deals with open sites and maintenance than building requirements. The commission picks spots for historic markers and is responsible for upkeep at sites, including the Andrew Jackson birthplace in partnership with state park officials.

The city of Lancaster works with a nonprofit historic preservation group, but doesn’t have one operating through the city.

Morse understands both sides of review board work. She leads the Fort Mill History Museum, including when that group moved into and repainted an historic home just off the top of Main Street. Morse recalls having to get approvals for the smallest details.

A palette may have smoothed away some of that effort, she said. It would make paint questions “a little less subjective.” Plus, she adds, the review board already makes decisions on paint unless it’s a straight color-for-color job.

“If you’re going to replace it exactly with the same color, you don’t have a problem,” she said. “If you want to change it then you get into some things. Those requirements already exist.”

If someone in the historic district wants to go with a color outside the approved palette, they could come to the board and ask. Just the same as they would now.

“I don’t think that it’s meant in any way to deny anybody the opportunity to come to the board to be heard on something different,” Morse said.

Chris Pettit, town planning director, said the information on other communities and paint palettes at the recent review board meeting are only for informational and discussion purposes for now.

If a paint scheme is chosen, it would take time to notice change on Main or elsewhere in the district. Homes and businesses wouldn’t have to change their colors. The palettes would be used over time, as those buildings need repainting.