From the 49-Forum Hugh.
The revised zoning laws passed in 2004 by our City Council revamped the notification requirements for zoning changes, greatly in favor of developers.
A zoning change (a.k.a. a "map amendment" or "re-zoning") requires a public hearing before the City Council's Committee on Zoning. Approval of a "special use" requires a public hearing before the Zoning Board of Appeals.
The hearing is still required, but the written notification of the hearing by mail was eliminated. Under the old law, a developer seeking a zoning change, zoning variation, or special use was required to notify property owners within a certain radius of the date and time of the required public hearing. Under the new law the developer is only required to notify neighboring property owners of his filing an APPLICATION for the zoning change, but NOT of the hearing!
In fact, the new laws insists that the City not schedule the hearing until the "notice" of the application is sent out. Then it's up to the neighbors to keep calling downtown until the hearing is scheduled. If you call as soon as you get the notice, you will be told the hearing has not been scehduled yet, and asked to call back again. Our Aldermen and the developers who fund their campaigns made life easier for developers and made it harder for neighbors in order to discourage public participation. The elimination of the notification by mail to nearby neighbors of the date, time, and place of the public hearing of a zoning change is a great step backwards for encouraging citizen participation in government, empowering residents to take ownership of their neighborhoods, and controlling development. It is a serious blow to those sympathetic with preservation.
Of course, playing hide-and-seek with the date of a zoning hearing is a time-honored tradition for the Zoning Committee. If you got one of the old letters, a "notice of a public hearing before the Zoning Committee", and you and a few of your neighbors agreed to take time off work to go downtown, you could pretty much count on the hearing being mysteriously postponed.
You'd get downtown, find the room, maybe sit patiently through a few hours of other stuff, and then there's no hearing. The Alderman monitor their phone calls, letters, e-mails, and the press, and if they suspect even a few citizens might show to testify against, they juggle the agenda, the lot in question goes last, and they don't seem to get to it in time. This simple trick reliably reduces the testimony against by half, at least.
Not too many people will actually take off work to attend a zoning hearing, and precious few will take two, or three.
And the postponing trick didn't cost the Aldermen anything, because while the old zoning law legally required the developer to notify nearby property owners of the hearing, there was no requirement under law to provide notification of re-scheduled hearings. So they never sent out notices except for the first, cancelled hearing. They didn't have to.
Some of us hoped that this little loophole might have been closed in the new zoning law, but our esteemed Aldermen took the opposite tack: they got themselves out of the notification-by-mail business all together. A legal requirement on alderman, administrators, and developers, that they communicate with the community, was dropped.
It's exactly as if the Aldermen said to the public, "Look, we can always cancel the hearing, you know it, we know it. Why don't you just take it as read that the first scheduled hearing will be cancelled? This useless notifying by mail is a waste of everyone's time and money."
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