Scary. The City Commission must be hearing from its constituents— and actually listening to them. Normally the Commission adores restrictive laws.
Even when a proposed ordinance makes it to the Commission meeting in unacceptably rough shape, the Commissioners will take great pains to forge it into something that can successfully restrict the previously-unrestricted rights of the majority of the citizens of Key West. Something that will provide sufficient pain or pressure to make people say, when they awake in the morning, "Damn! City Commission was in session again last night!" Something that will guarantee that only people with big bankrolls, big-gun attorneys and the foresight to ask the City's permission four months before the fact can build a dog house, or throw a party, or ride a bike on the streets of Key West.
So why did the Commission suddenly become squeamish Tuesday night and table a perfectly good ordinance that would have forced people to build within one year or lose their HARC (Historic Architectural Review Commission) approval and be forced back to square one?
What I particularly liked about the proposed rule was that it would speed up the building in this town (just like all other other supposed "growth management rules").
It would have forced people to say, "I don't have the money to build this dog house right, and I don't really want to build anything until I retire in 2005, but if I don't build it this year I will have to go back in front of HARC with my hat in hand and my 8-by-10 glossies of the site, and color swatches, and architect's drawings— and if, by then, some guy I cut off in traffic has been appointed to the Board, I may have my project deep-sixed forever. Better build it this year, however badly, than wait and take the chance of never again having the opportunity to build."
Then people would have hastily and poorly constructed stuff they didn't want to build in the first place, and we would all have the excuse to sit around and complain how the City looks trite and shoddy and is going to hell in a handbasket and the Commission is doing absolutely nothing to restrict people's previously unrestricted rights. All of which suits me fine, because it gives me something to write about.
But NO! First of all, Commissioner Jeremy Anthony asks if this law would affect any current cases under litigation by the City. City Attorney Robert Tischenkel's initial response was a hearty "No", but he later changed that answer to reflect the "small chance it might affect two cases."
Then Percy Curry says he thinks the proposed ordinance would be "adding to the bureaucracy." (Of course, we have come to expect retrograde, reactionary responses from him because he is terminally un-hip and doesn't understand how City government works at all.
Then Commissioner Harry Bethel chimes in, saying he won't vote for it either.
Just when I thought that Mr. I'm-Not-Going-To-Sit-Up-Here-and-Let-People-Get-Away-With-This was "getting wi th the program" and starting to enjoy the primary mission of the board, which is to "tighten" ordinances, eliminate useful loopholes and provide the other City boards and bureaucracies with "more teeth" to make citizens' lives action-filled and entertaining (and to provide me with headlines of course! Double your permitting, double your fun!)
Bethel said the ordinance offered HARC another chance to change its mind and say, "change this, change that" just a year after putting the property owner through a full approval process. He said it increased the bureaucracy and provided "job security" for the paper pushers without any apparent benefit to the property owner.
City Planner Ty Symrowski, the bearer of the ordinance (on behalf of the HARC board and the Planning Commission) seemed taken aback. This could be an historic event: has the City Commission ever before seen a Land Development Regulation (LDR) it didn't love?
Tischenkel rushed in with the cocoa butter, trying to save the day. He used the "housekeeping" argument, saying the ordinance merely tries to bring HARC approvals into conformity with existing variances and building permits, which expire after one year (so as to speed up the build-out in this town, we would have to assume. People were getting lazy about building in the Keys in the mid 1970s, thus the need for a Growth Management Plan and time-sensitive LDRs.) Also, "circumstances might change" requiring HARC adjustment, said the City Attorney.
Silly me. I thought that any Key West thing in existence before 1914 was "historic," that time was a one-way street, and there was no remodeling history. Except maybe to accommodate parking meters, tan-and-red plastic trash receptacles, green-and-white reflective street signs and of course "passionate purple" as an historically acceptable color for shutters and doors.
Commissioner Anthony made a motion to table the ordinance and was unanimously supported by the board. But the ordinance may not be gone for good. The biggest problem with it, in my informed opinion, is that it only ran two pages. Probably emanated directly out of the Planning Department, never even made it across Tischenkel's desk. Tischenkel, as we know, is a published author who writes JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT. Believe me, this spells trouble. By the time he adds 16 pages specifying in minute detail who has to perform which tantric positions to humor HARC, and who gets exempted, and what is historic, and who gets the bill, the City Commission will be ready to take this proposed law more seriously.
When it does, KWTN will be there.