Apr. 12, 2007 - Fleet Maintenance Facility
Following Message from Robert Pearce:
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Fellow Neighbors,
As some of you already know, the City has initiated a Petition to expand it’s Fleet Maintenance Facility within the Public Works Compound on NW 39th Avenue. The Compound extends southward to NW 33rd Avenue, and abuts our Residential Single-Family Zoning District neighborhood along it‘s entire length, where it abuts the north side of Koppers. What is being proposed is a 20,000 square foot building expansion along with a substantial increase in impervious surface area for parking and maneuvering, in order to accommodate the service and repair of GRU’s 500 or so heavy trucks and service vehicles. This is in addition to the 800 or so buses, fire engines, trucks, various other motor vehicles and heavy equipment the Facility is currently servicing. This expansion will significantly reduce the natural vegetative buffers, it will increase the noise, the visual pollution, the industrial lighting, and it will further degrade Springstead Creek.
The areas closest to the Public Works Compound will obviously suffer the most severe of the adverse impacts from this expansion, however, the detrimental impact it will have on reinvestment and revitalization efforts will ripple outward throughout the entire neighborhood.
The Petition to expand the Facility has been pulled from the April 12, 2007 DRB (Development Review Board) Agenda. This is the third continuance. These repeated continuances are not merely associated with ongoing site plan revisions (which are of an inconsequential nature anyway). I would like to try to explain to everyone the extraordinary significance of what is really going on here.
There are some very serious fundamental questions regarding what (if any) “permitted uses“ are actually allowed on the Public Works Compound property. By applying for an expansion of it’s Fleet Maintenance Facility, the City has inadvertently brought to light this heretofore-shadowed issue.
If you can bear to read through all of this, I will do my best to explain the situation. A golden opportunity has presented itself for this neighborhood to do something very positive in it‘s own behalf, an opportunity that we should not squander.
Every parcel in the City has a Zoning District classification placed on it. Each of the conventional zoning district categories has an established list of “uses permitted by right” (commonly referred to as “permitted uses”) associated with it. The City Compound property, however, has PS Zoning District classification. PS is a Special Use District. The “permitted uses” on each PS zoned parcel are site-specific. These site-specific “permitted uses” are required, by Code, to be included in the ordinance placing PS classification each individual PS parcel. The purpose of this is to safeguard against the adverse impacts resulting from incompatible adjacent uses.
From all the evidence gathered to date, it appears that when the City placed PS Zoning District classification on the City Compound property back in 1983, they neglected to include any “permitted uses” in the rezoning ordinance, as required by Code.
Consequently, there are actually no “permitted uses” currently associated with this parcel. There can be no site plan review before the Development Review Board to expand any use that is not a currently “permitted use” on a parcel.
What this means is that before any Site Plan Approval Petition can go before the DRB (176SPA-06 DB), the City must initiate a Zoning Petition that would go to the City Plan Board, and then on to the City Commission, in order to establish the “permitted uses” on the Compound parcel.
Back in January, the Mayor and the City Manager were made aware of this in person.
But the City DOES NOT want to do this because it opens a HUGE door in that it would require Public Hearings that would involve a fresh examination regarding exactly what “permitted uses” are truly appropriate immediately adjacent to our Residential Single Family (RSF-1) Zoned neighborhood. That discussion would also bring fully into the light any of the other industrial types of uses for which the City has begun to use the property for that might never have been “permitted uses”, all of which would, by Code, be required to cease. The current Fleet Maintenance Facility operation, along with all of the other industrial types of uses within the Compound, would be brought into jeopardy.
Consequently, the City Attorney’s Office, the Community Development Department, the Planning Department, and the City Managers Office have been working for 4 months now trying to figure a way to wriggle around it’s own Code. They are in a huge predicament. This is why there have been so many continuances.
If, when it was built, the Fleet Maintenance Facility (or any other current use) was, in fact, a “permitted use” in the Compound’s previous zoning district classification, but is not currently a “permitted use” (which it is not), then it is classified as a “legal non-conforming use“. “Legal non-conforming uses” (commonly referred to as simply “non-conforming uses”) are allowed to continue, but they are expressly prohibited by Code from being expanded upon, intensified, added onto, or rebuilt. Hence, the Fleet Maintenance Facility expansion would be prohibited.
If, when it was built, the Fleet Maintenance Facility (or any other current use) was not in fact a “permitted use” in any of the previous zoning district categories, then it would be classified as an “illegal” use, and must be removed.
This is much more significant than just a site plan review. The stakes here are ENORMOUS, both for the neighborhood as well as the City. Make no mistake, the City is gathering their biggest guns on this, and they will take no quarter. They will be talking about all the “compromises” they’re making while running you through with a rapier.
The flip side to all of the aggravation we are having to endure and all of the hearings that might be involved, is that a truly once in a lifetime opportunity has presented itself for our neighborhood to actually force the City to remove the industrial uses from within the Public Works Compound, provided we present a united front towards that end when and if the City initiates the Zoning Hearings before the Plan Board and then the City Commission.
Any further entrenchment of industrial uses at this location would be extremely undesirable for the whole of our neighborhood, and so I urge all residents to stay on alert regarding future hearing dates.
Robert Pearce
378-3919
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