Municipal Permitting

Subscribe to Municipal Permitting
Street Cable

The municipal regulation of public utility facilities continues to be a topic of litigation.  In April 2018, we discussed how municipalities cannot use zoning ordinances to regulate non-building facilities of public utilities.  Recently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court weighed in on whether a municipality can regulate when and how a public utility installs its improvements within the municipality’s street rights-of-way.  Again, the litigation resulted in a favorable decision for the public utility.

In PPL Electric Utilities Corp. v. City of Lancaster, 2019 Pa. LEXIS 4611 (Pa. 2019), the City of Lancaster adopted an ordinance to regulate the installation of public utilities in City streets.  This effort was not surprising as many municipalities look at their street rights-of-way as a critical asset that must be protected. …
Continue Reading

Public Notice

We mentioned in a prior post that failing to follow procedural requirements for land use hearings can lead to unwanted results for all – or at least most – involved. In a recent example, the Commonwealth Court ruled that Lewis Township’s Zoning Ordinance was void from inception after finding that the Board of Supervisors failed to comply with the Municipalities Planning Code (the “MPC”) requirements for adopting zoning ordinances.

In Yannaccone v. Lewis Twp. Bd. of Supervisors, the Township formed a Zoning Ordinance Committee (“ZOC”) to create a proposed zoning ordinance to present to the Board for adoption. The Board published notice of a public hearing scheduled on the Ordinance. The Board held the hearing in accordance with the public notice and subsequently adopted the Ordinance at a later regularly scheduled meeting. Less than one month after the Ordinance became effective…
Continue Reading

In an earlier blog post we discussed a zoning case from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania that involved the keeping of ducks as emotional support animals on a residential property.  In that case, the zoning hearing board determined that the ducks were permitted on the property as pets and that the keeping of ducks as pets was not an agricultural operation as alleged in the enforcement notice.  Last month, a zoning hearing board in a York County, Pennsylvania municipality was asked to determine whether the keeping of pot-bellied pigs as emotional support animals on a residential property is permitted.

According to an article published in the York Daily Record, a family acquired two pot-bellied pigs as emotional support animals for their son.  The family also has two dogs and three cats, and all the animals live in the house with the family.…
Continue Reading

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