Here’s a heartening (well, sort of, as you’ll see) little event that took place at a little-heralded government meeting this week. It involves planning commissioners pushing to get a better outcome on a proposed rezoning.
The rezoning in question involves a highly visible corner at East Boulevard and Scott Avenue, in the heart of the Dilworth neighborhood’s commercial district. If you’ve lived in Charlotte for a long time, you’ll remember it as the site of the still-missed Epicurean Restaurant, home of fabulous steaks and The World’s Best Biscuits, small morsels of buttery heaven which perfectly trained waiters brought around to your table throughout the evening, so you ended up consuming several thousand calories in biscuits alone, along with your steak and potato.
The Epicurean closed about 12 years ago. The Castanas family that’s owned the property since 1959 tried to redevelop the site in the late 1990s but couldn’t get the financing, owner George Castanas told me on Wednesday.
They want to put a parking lot at that key intersection. (Actually, people have been parking there already, in violation of existing zoning, NS, which doesn’t allow parking lots.) So they’re seeking a rezoning. It’s complicated, involving something called a “Pedscape Overlay” for East Boulevard. But the upshot is that the new zoning category they seek would require an improved, wider sidewalk along East. The owners want to keep the same old sidewalk, which a Charlotte DOT staffer estimated at 5 feet with a small planting strip, or none, depending on where you look.
The planning staff is OK with letting the rezoning go forward without an improved sidewalk. Indeed, because the rezoning would be to something called “optional” – B-1 (PED-O) instead of B-1 (PED) – the better sidewalk wouldn’t, technically, required. The “optional” means you can do pretty much what you want as long as the city will let you get away with it. (Some optional options are more palatable than others, of course.)
Throwing aside the larger question of why you’d have a supposedly pedestrian-friendly zoning standard (i.e. PED) at one of the key intersections in the main commercial area of one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods that allows a surface parking lot — after all, can you say “pedscape”? – why didn’t the planning staff at least push the owners to improve that bad sidewalk?
At Wednesday’s meeting of the Zoning Committee (which is a sub-set of the appointed Planning Commission, the one that makes recommendations to the City Council on rezoning petitions) several commissioners began pushing the staff on this very question. Nina Lipton, Tracy Dodson, Greg Phipps and Claire Fallon all chimed in, diplomatically, of course, to suggest that something better for the public could be accomplished. The planners’ point had been that the parking lot isn’t likely to be the permanent development at that corner, so whatever happens now is likely just interim.
But commissioners Lipton and Fallon both questioned how long “interim” might be, since the lot’s been sitting undeveloped for 12 years already.
With the property owner really wanting that parking lot, and really needing a rezoning to make the parking lot legal, the planners actually have some leverage in this case. Yet they didn’t appear to have tried to use it.
In the end, the Zoning Committee voted to delay making their recommendation on the rezoning until September to give the property owner time to “work with the neighborhood” – i.e. the Dilworth community association – to come up with an idea that’s closer to the spirit of the pedscape designs.