NIMBYist at heart
Residents along Twin Sunset Road are upset because a developer wants to build something other than a single-family home on a parcel of land he acquired at the corner of Twin Sunset and Evergreen roads.
Twin Sunset Road is a small dead-end street with half a dozen homes, mostly built in the 1960s, located in the town of Middleton at the western edge of the city of Middleton, just north of the newer Hidden Oaks neighborhood, which consists of about 120 single-family homes in a much higher density setting. To the north, hidden from direct view, is the Whispering Pines development, a neighborhood of 90 condominiums spread over six buildings. Capital Ice Arena to the east is partly hidden from view by a berm.
While the homes on Twin Sunset are in the town of Middleton, the vacant lot to be developed is in the city.
The lot is currently zoned R-1 (single-family home; maximum three floors or 35 feet high, whichever is less; minimum lot size 7,200 square feet; minimum lot width 60 feet), but, after getting some feedback from the City's Planning Department and the Plan Commission, the developer has applied for rezoning to PDD (planned development district), which allows for greater flexibility. For financial reasons, and out of a desire to create more housing space, the developer wants to build more than one single-family residence.
City staff is generally favorable to the idea, arguing that a medium-density development would make a nice transition between the low-density housing on Twin Sunset, and the higher-density neighborhoods to the north and south. The residents on Twin Sunset Road, predictably maybe, don't see it that way. They see anything other than a single-family home on a large lot as an unwelcome intrusion into their world (and it is likely that some of them are unhappy about the prospect of anything at all being built there).
Of course, considering the size of the parcel, even under the current R-1 zoning the developer could split his land into two lots and build two single-family homes, effectively doubling the density without any of the neighbors or the Plan Commission being able to do anything to prevent it.
But he wants to create more affordable housing, and has submitted six options to the City, which were discussed at the August 25 Plan Commission meeting during the concept-approval phase (concept approval is not project approval and commits the City to nothing yet, but it provides guidance to the developer as to the direction in which they should or should not proceed; the whole approval process with public hearing, GIP and SIP is yet to come). The options consist of two variations each of proposals for six, five and four units in a variety of building configurations, condominiums or townhomes, renter- or owner-occupied.
After a long and sometimes acrimonious debate bordering on the ludicrous, the Plan Commission approved a motion by Kurt Paulsen, seconded by Mike Slavish, to 'endorse the concept of allowing a subdivision of two lots with up to one duplex (two units) on each lot' with six votes to one (examples pictured).
The lone opposing vote was Kathryn Tyson who had fiercely argued against anything that would increase the density beyond what is allowed under current zoning (her motion, seconded by John Schaffer, to that effect was defeated with five votes to two).
Kathryn Tyson and, to a slightly lesser extent, John Schaffer (who is the Park, Recreation & Forestry Commission delegate on the Plan Commission) have emerged as the self-appointed guardians of the status quo in all development matters (i.e. defenders of the NIMBY crowd). While paying half-hearted lip service to the need for higher density in order to create more affordable housing and to prevent urban sprawl, she radically opposes any infill project that would increase density or might lead to affordable housing. Often she is so far out in left field in her ramblings that she seems to even embarrass fellow-rambler mayor Gurdip Brar who appointed her to the Plan Commission in the first place.
But she also displays increasing signs of erratic behavior. At another recent Plan Commission meeting she suggested razing the whole downtown residential block between Terrace Avenue, Parmenter Street, Middleton Street and South Avenue, including the historic Pierstorff building (which is currently home to the Restoring Hope Transplant House), and replacing it with modern houses. That outburst must have rendered her fellow-commissioner and sometimes-ally John Schaffer catatonic: He lives in a historic house at the opposite corner of Middleton Street and South Avenue, and keeps a suspicious eye on every building project that might threaten the feel of the neighborhood.
Kathryn Tyson herself, by the way, lives in a condominium on Pond View Court near Tiedeman Pond as one of the original owners. When those condominiums were first proposed sixteen or so years ago, they provoked the same type of neighborhood opposition that she then dismissed as NIMBYism, but now champions. In other words, do as I say, not as I did.
Codex interruptus
When good intentions mate with bad information, their offspring is rarely an improvement over an existing situation. Alderwoman Susan West (district 6) tried to be the matchmaker for just that kind of union at the September 1 Common Council meeting when she proposed giving Scooters Coffee (a drive-through coffee shop on University Avenue that complaints about not being visible enough from the road) the City's official blessing to install small signs (like yard signs) or sandwich signs in the public right-of-way.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, the coffee shop has been frustrated for many months now in its attempts to get permission for a monument sign in a spot that is partial right-of-way. The frustrator-in-chief is the City's Public Works Committee (PWC), of which Susan West and district 2 alderman Robert Burck are members. PWC's hardline position has been that no signs are allowed in public right-of-way, period. No exceptions. (Actually, there are exceptions in the city, but they are exceptional enough to be irrelevant here. They are also allowed under special licensing agreements between the business or property owner and the City, although why PWC has refused to agree to a licensing agreement in this case is a bit of a mystery.)
Scooters Coffee is more exceptional than most other exceptions, because, by the City's own admission, the public right-of-way there is unusually, and unnecessarily, large and oddly shaped. It was suggested that maybe some of the right-of-way could be vacated, but PWC then stumbled over the question of who owned the right-of-way, the County or the City. The City's director of Public Works, Shawn Stauske, was sent to investigate the mystery.
On September 1, City Administrator Mike Davis announced that it was no mystery at all, but that all rights-of-way had gone to the City when it took over University Avenue from the County a few years ago. (The mystery now is why the director of Public Works did not know that, or, if he did, why he did not say so at the PWC meetings where the matter was discussed ad nauseam.)
Meanwhile, during the Council discussion on the Scooters exception, which at times was almost surreal in its displays of aldermanic ignorance of City ordinances and policies, it emerged that the City generally does not enforce its ordinance on sandwich-boards and other small signs anyway, unless it receives a complaint (according to Mike Davis, only the City's ordinance against jaywalking is more ignored by the people and less enforced by the City). City staff also seems to be of the opinion that, especially in these covid-times, overzealous enforcement of petty regulations would do more harm than good.
So, after spending almost an hour on trying to get all their well intentioned but badly informed opinions to mate, the Council members finally came to the conclusion that maybe they shouldn't spawn any more red tape, that the output would probably be horribly misshapen anyway, and that the best course of (non-) action was a codex interruptus.
Flattening the curve
In a more productive moment, the Common Council decided unanimously on September 1 to allow restaurants to expand their sidewalk seating into the streets, to waive the normal fees for expanded seating, and to accelerate the approval process by giving the City Administrator the authority to issue the appropriate permits. Normally, sidewalk seating permits require completing a time-consuming obstacle course through a variety of committees and commissions. The fact that it can now be done faster, cheaper and easier might be a hopeful indicator that some bureaucratic (and especially committee-based) obstacles could be flattened permanently.