Five board members, five staff and one “agent” reverend gathered in the basement of City Hall one recent morning to take part in what have become the most low-profile, high-impact rounds of “yeas” and “nays” in city government”” an insiders’ club otherwise known as the debating and voting sessions of the Board of Zoning Appeals.
Just two weeks beforehand, fuming neighbors had filled the aisles of the Hall of Records auditorium railing against plans for a new Dunkin’ Donuts and pleading their case for liquor licenses at the monthly BZA meeting. After taking the mic and answering questions from the board, interested parties headed home. They knew the vote wouldn’t be that night. It would be “sometime in the next two weeks or so.”
In December, board members chose a Thursday morning to cast the fatal “yeas” that granted two liquor licenses, approved a new climbing gym and the expansion of Lulu’s coffee shop.
Even though it attracts far more public interest than most city boards, the BZA is apparently the only one that regularly waits to vote until most of the public has little chance of knowing when or where that’s going to happen.
Voting sessions, at which no public testimony is accepted, are held at varying days and times of the week. There’s no pattern, confirmed BZA Chair Eduardo Perez (pictured above), whose term expires in February.
These days, BZA meetings can stretch well over three hours. By the end, weary board members, who must process heaps of testimony and reports for each request for zoning variances in each corner of the city, usually call the meeting to an end without taking a vote, said Perez.
At a Dec. 21 vote, the once-brimming hall was visited by only a handful of staff, one attorney, and the Rev. Boise Kimber, has been taking on “clients” in real estate and zoning projects.
People with pending applications are alerted by telephone when the voting sessions are held.
Other members of the public must essentially resort to the old crystal ball: Meetings are advertised via posters in the city/town clerk’s office and zoning office, but sometimes only 24 hours in advance, according to Karyn Gilvarg, the City Plan director.
That means in order to catch a voting session, one may need to pester the zoning clerk on the phone, or trek to the Hall of Records, at least once per day.
Why does this matter? Voting sessions are the one chance the public gets to hear the debates and arguments behind decisions affecting the city landscape for decades to come. At these hard-to-predict, reportedly scarsely attended sessions, five powerful people sit down and decide the fate of downtown behemoths and temper-flaring neighborhood projects alike. There, they stamp through a collosal condo tower, and mull the latest addition to an East Rock McMansion.
Why are the voting sessions not held in a regular pattern, thus made more open to public viewing?
“We have required referrals from other city commissions, so we cannot vote on those items” at the BZA meetings, responded Perez after the Dec. 21 vote in the all-but-empty hearing room.
Some items require referrals to the City Plan Commission for site plan or inland/wetlands review. They then return to the BZA for a vote. “It’s much more efficient” to take the vote after those reports come back, said Perez. “It saves the city money” not to issue two sequential decisions on an application.
Could the votes be taken at a predictable monthly time, or at a time announced at the BZA meetings? Perez indicated not. Developers’ time concerns sometimes require “quick meetings,” such as the Dec. 21 meeting, where some pressing applications are considered, and others (such as the two Dunkin’ Donuts projects) are not, Perez argued.
Meeting with regularity is difficult under the surmounting heaps of work the volunteers undertake, he added.
“We have handled an incredible volume of applications “” we have tried to be as efficient and as open to the public as possible,” he claimed. During Perez’s tenure, the number of meetings per year has stretched from nine to 10, he said, to accommodate extra flow.
For applicants tiptoeing their way between zoning barbed wire, missing a meeting can be puzzling, at best. When out-of-towner David Onze, for example, issued a first application to build a climbing gym along the harbor, this statement was all that he learned from the vote:
“Your application dated September 12, 2006, heard on October 10, 2006, relative to referenced property, seeking, Special Exception to permit a climbing gym in a Heavy Industrial zone, was considered by the Board of Zoning Appeals at a Voting Session October 31, 2006. The application was considered in accordance with Section 63 of the New Haven Zoning Ordinance. Permission is hereby denied.”
Reading the letter gave Onze no inkling of the reasons for rejection. For those, he had to appeal to the kindness of City Plan staff for a verbal explanation. (The Port Authority lobby against his project had apparently prevailed.)
Gilvarg, the City Plan chief, said she has sometimes missed a voting session herself because it was scheduled only one day in advance and she either didn’t get the call or couldn’t make the date.
She declined to opine whether the meeting process should be made more open when a new BZA chair comes along next year. “The board has a difficult problem because of the volume of applications,” that prevents them from voting matters on the night of the public hearing, when all are gathered in the room, she said.
Is the process open enough for you, dear readers? Weigh in by posting a comment below.
It's a little hard to believe that, in this day and age, times and locations for voting sessions cannot be posted on the web and emailed to anyone who indicates interest in attending the voting session by submitting an email address at the regular monthly BZA meeting.