Editorial: Ten years on life support
The Town Board is running a new proposal up the flagpole for tweaking the zoning code’s rules governing pre-existing, non-conforming uses — those businesses operating in residential neighborhoods legally because they date back to the days before zoning. The Chequit, Ram’s Head and La Maison Blanche inns are among the most obvious examples. Another example that is on a lot of people’s minds is the Shelter Island Nursery, which is in foreclosure and appears to be inactive. Smaller non-conforming businesses are scattered in residential areas all over the Island.
The last time the town tried to tweak the code to make it clearer — something the Zoning Board of Appeals asked it to do — Jack Kiffer of the Dory and Sean McLean, then-president of the Chamber of Commerce and an owner of the Shelter Island Nursery, led a wave of protests. They said the board was trying to kill the Island’s special character and ruin its small businesses.
The Town Board, which was merely trying to clarify some muddy rules for determining when a non-conforming business could expand, by how much, and when such a use should be considered abandoned, backed down.
The new proposal, developed by a committee of stakeholders led by Councilwoman Chris Lewis, does a good job of making it absolutely clear that a non-conforming business may not be expanded into structures and onto properties that lie beyond its own original lot lines. It also does a good job making it clear when a non-conforming business should be considered abandoned: after one year of “substantial discontinuance.”
The problem is a provision that would allow owners of those abandoned businesses to file a notice with the Building Department that they intend to revive their operations within two years. They could do that five times, stretching the twilight of a dying business to a whole decade.
That’s way too long.
There’s a good reason for having code language that makes it absolutely clear when a non-conforming use has been abandoned. When a business in a residential area fails, and can’t be revived, it should lose its status as a legal non-conforming use. The zoning classification of its site should become one and the same with all the properties around it. That’s a basic rule of zoning everywhere.
Allowing a virtually defunct business to linger on, perhaps as an eyesore and hazard, for 10 years is precisely what the zoning code should prohibit. In seeking a compromise on this point, the Town Board’s committee has bent over so far backwards it has turned things upside down, clearing a way to put a non-conforming use that has been dead for years on life support. One two-year extension, for a total of four years in limbo, seems reasonable.
