2008.08.25
Ready, fire, aim
There was a lively discussion in Radford City Council Chambers Monday night about zoning.
For months now, council has been trying to get some land rezoned so that land can be sold and someone can build a house on it. It's a classic case of no good deed going unpunished.
The land in question is in an area zoned for businesses, though it's mostly houses right now. That puts people in the awkward position of not being able to expand their houses -- though they could turn their land over to all sorts of businesses, including, apparently, a junkyard.
Council's solution was to rezone the area for mixed used -- houses and businesses. But some folks who live in the neighborhood didn't get it. They seemed to think their neighborhood was residential just because it's filled with residences.
Not so.
They worried that the rezoning would open their area up to all manner of non-residential uses. That's not right either. The area is already open to all manner of non-residential uses. And it's not open to new residences or improvements to old ones.
City attorney Jim Guynn tried to explain that the rezoning would actually make the neighborhood safe for houses. As it stands now, Guynn explained, houses are, in zoning language, "a non-conforming use." That's not a good thing to be.
"They can't put on a screen porch," Guynn said of homeowners living in the business zone.
The rezoning would fix that. So council prepared to vote on a rezoning ordinance.
But they couldn't. Though the ordinance was listed right there on council's agenda, it wasn't in the stack of papers council gets before each meeting. Guynn hadn't drafted it yet.
Next time.
-- Tim Thornton
