Municipal Permitting

Subscribe to Municipal Permitting

In blog posts last year (available HERE and HERE), we reviewed the challenges that municipalities face in regulating short-term rentals under existing zoning ordinances that do not specifically address the use.  One case we discussed was Slice of Life, LLC v. Hamilton Township Zoning Hearing Board, 164 A.3d 633 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2017).  The Commonwealth Court’s decision in Slice of Life was appealed and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently reversed the Commonwealth Court’s decision.

In Slice of Life, the Township issued an enforcement notice to the property owner alleging that the property was being used as a hotel or other type of transient lodging in violation of the zoning ordinance.  According to the zoning ordinance, single-family residential was the only permitted use in the underlying zoning district.  The Township’s zoning ordinance defined the term “family” as…
Continue Reading

Mall

Recently, Frank Chlebnikow, AICP and I co-presented a program entitled “Finding Valuable Commercial Space Under Parking Lots” at the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors’ 97th Annual Educational Conference.  The program discussed problems (and potential solutions) many communities are experiencing due to the increasing amount of vacant retail spaces in shopping malls and big-box retail stores.  Most communities experience impacts such as a stagnating/declining tax base and operating revenue shortfalls, leading to a reduction in municipal services, loss of businesses and residents, limited property reinvestment, and increasing tax rates.  But mature, built-out suburban and urban communities must also deal with the lack of undeveloped land, aging and inadequately maintained infrastructure, traffic congestion and addressing stormwater runoff issues while complying with federal/state mandates.

One thing is certain, the traditional mall and suburban commercial corridor model (a “shopping mall”) that includes one or more sprawling, single-story buildings dominated by retail and department store tenants surrounded by seas of parking lots, is not the future.…
Continue Reading

We are accustomed to seeing some accommodations for emotional support animals in the housing context.  Recently, a Borough’s zoning hearing board and the Court of Common Pleas were asked to resolve a similar issue in a zoning case.  The facts and issues in the case touched on urban agriculture issues that are becoming increasingly more common in addition to the interpretation of certain terms in the Borough’s zoning ordinance.  Like short-term rentals, emotional support animals and urban agriculture are uses that are not typically addressed in zoning ordinances, thereby leading to cases just like this.

A young boy with autism lived with his mother and grandfather in a two-family residential building on property owned by the grandfather and located in the Borough’s commercial zoning district.  The boy’s family acquired eight ducks as therapeutic pets after he had a positive experience with a friend’s pet duck.  The ducks were kept at the residential property, living outside in a fenced yard but also spending some time inside the house.  The Borough had attempted to deal with the keeping of animals on a residential property in the past.…
Continue Reading

In our first post on accessory uses, we introduced the value of accessory uses as a tool for permitting a land use that otherwise might not be permitted as a principal use.  We also discussed the two-part test for determining whether a use is accessory – is it (i) customarily incidental to and (ii) subordinate to the principal use?  In this post, we will conclude our discussion on accessory uses by looking at the “customarily incidental” part of the analysis.

The most important concept to remember when evaluating whether a use is “customarily incidental” to a principal use is not to assume that there must be evidence of a traditional relationship between the principal use and proposed accessory use.  All too often, zoning officers are inclined to take the position that something cannot be an accessory use because they have never seen the proposed accessory use together with a principal use.  This approach would lead to a stagnation of land uses that is not reflective of how uses evolve over time.…
Continue Reading

Recently, one forward thinking Pennsylvania grocery retailer opened a new Ecommerce hub facility at the site of one of its former, traditional grocery store buildings in a mixed-use neighborhood. Rather than demolishing the existing “brick and mortar” building, it is adaptively reusing the building by converting it to a new “click and mortar” facility.

For many retailers, the traditional retail approach includes a commercial building with a significant retail display and sales area directly accessible by customers selecting and purchasing their goods onsite.  But new approaches are popping up every day.  The new approach referenced above allows customers to place orders online using their electronic devices or onsite using tablets located in the building’s vestibule area.  Orders are processed and fulfilled onsite and either picked up by customers or delivered to customers via a delivery service.

This local retailer is just one example of an emerging business trend whereby “shopping fulfillment centers” are occupying vacant, former retail store buildings located in close proximity to customers.…
Continue Reading

In an earlier blog post (available here), we discussed how the Commonwealth Court reversed the decision by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (“PUC”) to no longer issue certificates of public convenience to neutral host DAS (i.e. “distributed antenna system”) network operators.  The PUC’s decision was based on its new interpretation of the statutory…

In our first two posts (Part 1 and Part 2), we discussed current approaches used by many communities to regulate parking, factors contributing to those approaches, and how those approaches are not sustainable because they consume large amounts of space and money.  Great anecdotal evidence of what we described is provided annually in a post from “Strong Towns” titled “The Best of #BlackFridayParking.”  It is worth a look.

In this, our third and final post, we discuss a few solutions communities, especially those seeking to encourage and support mixed use reuse, infill and redevelopment projects, may wish to consider when “right-sizing” their parking regulations.  In order to gauge impacts and determine the success of the parking solutions, we suggest limiting the following solutions by area (e.g., parcels, blocks or neighborhoods) or zoning district:…
Continue Reading

This is the second post in a two-post series on small cell facilities and the implications of the Declaratory Ruling and Third Report and Order (the “FCC Order”) that was adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (the “FCC”) in September.  The first post described small cell facilities, the reasons for the FCC Order, and included a discussion regarding the review standard adopted by the FCC.  This post discusses the fee standards and “shot clocks” that were adopted by the FCC in response to concerns raised by the wireless industry regarding excessive and unreasonable fees charged by municipalities, unequal treatment of small cell facilities compared to other utility facility installations, and lengthy review time periods for applications.

The FCC recognized that the fees charged by municipalities with respect to the deployment of small cell facilities can materially limit or inhibit the ability of the wireless service providers to compete.  Such fees are a critical issue for the industry since it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of small cell facilities will be deployed in the near future.  Excessive or unreasonable fees could serve to effectively prohibit the deployment of small cell facilities by rendering the proposed deployment economically infeasible.

The FCC Order addresses three types of fees charged by municipalities: (1) fees for access to the public rights-of-way; …
Continue Reading

In an earlier blog post, we looked at distributed antenna system (DAS) networks, a technology that wireless service providers are deploying to address the increasing demand for additional network capacity.  Another technology that is being deployed is the small cell facility.  This is the first post in a two-post series on small cell facilities and the Declaratory Ruling and Third Report and Order (the “FCC Order”) that was adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (the “FCC”) in September.  This post describes small cell facilities, provides the reasons the FCC adopted the FCC Order and discusses the review standard adopted by the FCC.  The next post will review the fee standards and “shot clocks” that were adopted by the FCC and some typical ordinance requirements.

Small cell facilities typically consist of a single antenna, attached either to an existing structure (e.g., a light pole, utility pole, traffic signal pole, etc.) or to a new structure, together with a small equipment cabinet.  Small cell facilities provide a much smaller coverage footprint than a traditional wireless antenna facility and are intended to provide additional network capacity in an area where wireless subscribers are more concentrated (e.g., a shopping center, an urban area, etc.).  Small cell facilities are often deployed within public rights-of way which has led to some tension between wireless service providers and municipalities.…
Continue Reading

Earlier this year, Claudia Shank blogged about the revival of the Environmental Rights Amendment (the “ERA”) (available HERE) after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Fund v. Commonwealth, 161 A.3d 911 (2017).  The PEDF decision breathed new life into the 1972 amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution, but also left many unanswered questions about the ERA.  The most relevant unanswered question for developers and municipalities was the meaning of the revived ERA in the land use context.  Last week, the Commonwealth Court provided some insight.

In Frederick v. Allegheny Twp. Zoning Hearing Board, 2018 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 593 (Commw. Ct. Oct. 26, 2018), the Court reviewed a substantive validity challenge to a zoning ordinance that permitted oil and gas wells by right in all zoning districts of a township.  In a 5 to 2 decision, an en banc panel rejected the challenge (and the accompanying land use appeal to a zoning permit) that was filed by objectors to an unconventional gas well project in a residential zoning district.  The Court dismissed the objectors’ argument that …
Continue Reading