New Elyria zoning, planning code approved out of committee

ELYRIA — An update of the city's 27-year-old planning and zoning code will finally go before City Council after more than a year and a half of work to overhaul. The Strategic Planning Committee, which contains all 11 Council members, voted Monday to send the new code before Council as a whole and recommend its passage. Officials, led by City Planner Chris Schoenig, have formulated a new 200-page planning and zoning code which they said would be more accessible to residents and a fair compromise between the city's existing character and new development. Because the proposal is a zoning update, it must be read three times during Council meetings and go through at least one public hearing before Council can vote. This means it will be at least a month before the new code can be adopted. On Monday, Schoenig said that the main purposes of the rewrite process were to simplify the code to make it more legible to regular citizens and to modernize the code to better fit the needs of a modern city. Schoenig emphasized that the new zoning code would be updated regularly as needs arose, not left unchanged for nearly three decades as it had been prior. "This is a living document," he said. "When this is approved, this is not the end of it. It can be amended. Think of the (U.S.) Constitution, it has been amended throughout the years. No document is perfect, we will amend this as needed based on any concerns from the community, hardships or nuisances… This (code) is a good and fair compromise." Council members asked Schoenig about how the code would address issues which have come before the body increasingly in recent years, such as the prevalence of vape or smoke shops, in-home daycares and the keeping of chickens in residential areas. All of those issues are either not addressed in the current code or addressed in outdated or unnecessarily restrictive ways, Schoenig said. An overabundance of smoke shops in recent years has been a common complaint among Elyria residents, and the new code seeks to address this by banning vape stores and smoke shops from opening within 1,000 feet of an existing shop. It blocks smoke shops from opening within 1,000 feet of other specified establishments including schools, daycares and liquor stores. Vape and smoke shops are also banned outright downtown as well as in the corridor district, a new mixed-use district centered around major thoroughfares. They are only allowed as a conditional use, meaning they need city approval, in commercial areas and are allowed by right only in industrial districts. "A lot of these uses that may be deemed nuisances or incompatible with the area, we have tried our best to vet them," Schoenig said. All existing businesses and properties, including vape stores, in the city will be grandfathered in if their new zoning district conflicts with their current use. This means that the updated requirements can only be enforced if they fall out of use and then try to reopen. On the topic of corridor districts, Councilman Ed Doehne, D-3rd Ward, said that he had concerns that the districts would add businesses into existing residential areas to the disruption of current and future residents. The corridor districts will be added along all streets that are considered "major thoroughfares" in the city, making them mixed-use areas that can have both residential and commercial uses. "My big concern is, as a resident, if I buy in a certain area that is primary residence, single-family residence, now when we do the corridor district, we can put mixed-uses through the whole thing," Doehne said. Schoenig said that most major roads in the city had originally been intended to be mixed-use spaces, and the new code addressed conflict between residential and commercial by requiring buffers between different uses and limiting things like drive thru hours within the district. Another issue which has gone before Council repeatedly is the question of in-home daycares, with many operators of such daycares arguing that the city's requirements for such properties were unnecessarily strict. City officials agreed, and the requirements for Type B daycares, which includes in-home facilities, were loosened in the new code. Two examples of this were an easing of parking and yard frontage requirements which were impossible for most single-family homes in the city to meet. In a similar vein, the new code also greatly reduces the frontage and other requirements needed to keep chickens on residential properties. It also ties the number of chickens a resident is allowed to keep to the number of acres they have on their property. Both in the cases of keeping chickens and in having an in-home daycare, Schoenig said property owners would still need to meet a list of requirements to get conditional use permits, but that these requirements would be more realistic and fair. The new proposed zoning map and zoning and planning code are available on the city's website at www.cityofelyria.org/department/community-development/cityplanning. Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.