By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
Dawson County is still working to perfect and enforce the new zoning regulations enacted for the Forest Park subdivision earlier this year.
A new wrinkle recently developed which is causing County Planner Dianna Broadie to go back and look for ways to further tweak the new zoning regulations the county commissioners approved in April.
Specifically, the corner lots in the subdivision pose a unique zoning challenge. Most of those corner lots — about 45 of them throughout the subdivision — have homes which face out towards the arterial street, rather than facing towards the neighborhood street with the rest of the houses on the block. That creates an issue with those corner lot properties vis a vis the setback distances from the street, alleys and other homes that subdivision zoning regulations require.
The issue had gone unnoticed until one of those corner lot owners recently came to Broadie looking to add on to their house.
“It just happened to come up because someone came in to do an addition,” she said. “It really wasn’t on my radar up to that point.”
A few of the corner lot property owners have purchased part of the lots behind them over the years, negating the setback issues in those cases, but Broadie said the bulk of the rest of them are “probably all legally non-conforming” to the setback provisions in the zoning regulations.
Those non-compliant properties have also actually been that way since before the new zoning regulations were passed. In fact, the new zoning regulations made no significant changes to setback provisions, Broadie noted, meaning most of those homes on corner lots were out of compliance with the original zoning regulations passed back in the 1970s.
However, she also noted that some of those homes were built even before the original zoning regulations were put in place. That makes them immune to them — unless the owner tries to make changes to the property.
“A lot of those house were built prior to the zoning regulations, so that’s when you have grandfathering,” Broadie said. “But grandfathering restricts the way you can modify a house.”
That’s why Broadie is currently looking into ways to adjust the zoning regulations a bit more where those corner lot properties are concerned.
The one property owner who came in wanting to add to their home had to go through the entire variance request process, which requires filing paperwork, fees and going through a public hearing before the county commissioners. Broadie wants to amend the regulations to make it so corner lot owners don’t have to go through that whole process any time they want to make an addition or modification to their property.
“As long as they’re not creating a problem for the neighborhood, it seems logical to come up with some solution with greater flexibility,” she said. “That’s the thing about zoning, it is a regulatory process, but zoning is somewhat flexible according to the situation.”
What Broadie isn’t flexible about are those property owners in Forest Park who have continued to ignore the new zoning regulations.
“We still have compliance issues,” Broadie said.
The major impetus for passing the new zoning regulations was a desire on the county’s part to more tightly control overnight vehicle parking, the long-term storage of fleet vehicles, trailers and other large equipment and other aesthetic issues within the subdivision’s commercial district.
“We’ve been trying to clean up some of the commercial (properties),” Broadie said.
However, while some of those commercial property owners have complied and Broadie said “we’ve gotten some things done,” others haven’t, nor shown any inclination to do so, to the point that she has now turned at least one of the cases over to the County Attorney’s office for resolution.
“I just haven’t been able to get them all to comply,” Broadie said.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.