The Henderson City Council received a revised amortization ordinance for auto repair facilities and junk yards Monday night and promptly pushed the matter aside until July.
The proposal would require an estimated 12 businesses in residential areas of the city and its Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction to close within three years and would force perhaps 20 other businesses that are in industrial and business areas and that predate the city’s zoning ordinance to make improvements to comply with the standards the city applies to new facilities.
The improvements include privacy fencing and, more expensively, paving of any area where cars are stored. The paving requirement drew an angry response from auto repair operators at the city Planning Board’s public hearing on the draft ordinance April 20.
Planning Director Grace Smith told the council Monday night that the provision of the ordinance that drew the biggest protest was the requirement that affected facilities in residential districts must shut down within three years. Those businesses that were grandfathered in under the zoning ordinance are decades old, and their owners raised complaints about fairness and about eliminating jobs in a city that desperately needs them.
“This is the most difficult ordinance we’ve drafted,” Smith told the Planning Board at one session this spring.
The revised ordinance, which the Planning Board unanimously approved May 2, does not change the phase-out provisions or the paving and other requirements for the vehicle businesses that remain.
“The only thing they really changed was they took out stuff about tags and inspection stickers” and substituted a 180-day time limit for vehicles to remain at a repair facility, Smith said Monday.
City Attorney John Zollicoffer also made a technical correction and increased the size of the lots in one section of the proposed ordinance from a minimum of 2 acres to a minimum of 6 acres. The setbacks for those facilities would have consumed the 2 acres.
In other tweaks approved by the Planning Board and made by Zollicoffer, the ordinance allows the storage of vehicles subject to litigation for as long as necessary, and it grants 180 days to store vehicles that are towed in under a contract with a government body or insurance company. Otherwise, vehicles can’t be brought in unless they are going to be repaired.
The draft ordinance also creates an exemption for any facility in the ETJ that received a county permit before Henderson took over zoning authority for an area extending 1.5 miles beyond the city borders. Smith and Zollicoffer said they know of one such facility.
The ordinance as now drafted fills nine pages, all aimed at the overriding goal of forcing businesses to stop piling up junked vehicles on their lots. That’s the problem that motivated the creation of the amortization ordinance, and that’s the purpose the Planning Board tried to preserve throughout its discussions.
But council members talking before Monday night’s meeting said the amortization ordinance is too complex to tackle in the middle of extensive budget discussions that can’t be postponed. Bernard Alston, for one, said that reading through the latest draft, he had trouble understanding the various conditions, and he‘s a lawyer.
Zollicoffer presented the council with a one-page summary of how the ordinance would affect various businesses under different conditions over three years, but he acknowledged that many circumstances don’t fit into his summary.
The council was due to schedule a public hearing for the ordinance, but Smith advised referring the proposal to a council committee for further work before holding a hearing. That recommendation alone carried weight with Mayor Clem Seifert, who said he couldn’t remember another time that Smith advised sending a Planning Board proposal to a committee as a first step.
“This is a big ordinance,” Smith said.
Smith hoped to have a meeting of the Land Planning and Development Committee in the next week, before she leaves for a job in Durham, but Chairwoman Elissa Yount said that won’t be possible with all of the budget work going on.
“It’s a lot here, and it’s a lot to go over,” Yount said. She also said she would like to visit the affected auto repair facilities and junkyards in the ETJ before proceeding.
Zollicoffer said he can advise the council on the legalities of the ordinance, but “where Grace is great is understanding the practicalities.”
Smith agreed to return to Henderson for a committee meeting at a future date. She also said she and the Planning Department staff are preparing a database of all of the affected businesses and their owners to make the information accessible for her successor and the council.
Yount made a motion, seconded by Alston, to table the ordinance until July 11, at which time the council will decide whether to schedule a public hearing and whether to refer the issue to a committee for further work. The motion passed unanimously on a voice vote.
The council did schedule one related public hearing for May 23. The council at that time will consider zoning ordinance amendments the Planning Board endorsed last week to require special-use permits for vehicle repair shops that open in the I-2, B-2 and B-2A zones.
Smith said the amendments would create uniform treatment for auto shops in the city and the ETJ. All of them in business and industrial districts would have to go before the Zoning Board of Adjustment to get permission to open.
The changes to the zoning ordinance are necessary if the City Council decides to go ahead with the amortization ordinance, but they also make sense without that ordinance, Smith said.