About eight years ago then mayor Howard Frimark and the city Council formed an “Ad Hoc Zoning Ordinance Rewrite Committee” tasked with re-writing the City’s Zoning Code. The City hired an outside consultant and conscripted seventeen Park Ridge residents – six of whom were attorneys – to do the job.

But almost immediately after the newly-rewritten ordinance was adopted, developers began identifying all sorts of gaps and inconsistencies that they tried to exploit – with varying degrees of success. And an old rumor got new life:

“Park Ridge is unfriendly to business.”

Anything that is unpredictable is, almost by definition, “unfriendly” to business. Unpredictability increases the risks inherent in already-risky business ventures – medical marijuana and casino gambling likely being the most notable exceptions. And that unpredictability can be perceived as “unfriendliness,” especially to prospective businesses and developers.

In the years that have passed since the “new” Zoning Code was enacted, it seems as if most developers come in looking for variances and MAP amendments; and expecting to get them. Often they have at least a colorable argument, given the gaps, inconsistencies and general ricketiness of many of the Code’s provisions.

So it should come as no surprise that a developer is threatening to sue the City for the Planning & Zoning Commission’s recent denial of his request to build a four-story primarily-residential building at 400 Talcott Road that formerly housed an auto repair business.

This proposed 4-story building would be located in a “business” rather than a “residential” district, but it will have approximately 1,429 square feet of commercial space and 22 two and three-bedroom condos, each of which reportedly will contain more square footage than the entire amount of commercial space. That apparently qualifies as “business”/commercial under our whacked-out Zoning Code.

And the language of our Zoning Code, as previously interpreted by City staff and approved by the P&Z Commission for the project at 20-30 South Fairview – by the same developer, John O’Flaherty – would appear to permit the kind of structure he wants to build on Talcott.

But there’s a difference between that Fairview project and the Talcott project.

The Fairview project appears to have been a favorite of City staff, including Senior City Planner Jon Branham. Consequently, City staff may have interpreted vague or ambiguous Zoning Code terms in ways that favored the developer and advanced that project earlier this year – without any regard for what kind of precedent such interpretations might set for future projects.

Precedent, as in predictability.

Back at the public hearing on May 27, P&Z chairman Joe Baldi expressed concern about the lack of Zoning Code standards for the Talcott style of residential development in a B-1 Retail and Office district. Had this project been located in an area zoned “R” (for “residential”), even the highest residential rating, R-4, would have limited the maximum number of residential units to around 10-15 units.

Which don’t provide enough profit for Mr. O’Flaherty, who paid $400,000 for the property with the understanding that he could build what he is proposing on that site.

And if O’Flaherty gets his way, storm water detention may be a combination of insufficient and stupid, because he gets to pay a fee-in-lieu of providing sufficient detention. A fee which we understand to be wholly inadequate to address already-problematic flooding. Doesn’t that sound just ducky!

While we don’t take kindly to any developer threatening to sue the City in order to get what it wants, O’Flaherty and his attorney rightly pointed out that developers buy property only after analyzing the zoning parameters, with the purchase price based on what they should be able to build there. And that determination is based on what increasingly appears to be a vague, ambiguous and unacceptably inadequate Zoning Code.

Interpreted by City staff and P&Z in ad hoc ways that make it unpredictable.  And unfriendly.

To business and to residents alike.

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