Lakewood Board of Adjustment Public Hearing
Wednesday December 19, 2007, at 7:00 PM
Lakewood Town Hall
The purpose of the public hearing was to review the request by Superior Savings Bank for a variance to build on a 40-acre parcel that does not have road frontage. The hearing was recessed from 12-12-07.
Present: Chair Steve Geving, Kerry Leider, Ann Cutts, and Recorder David Gerhart. Members of the public were in the audience (see attached register). Zoning Administrator Brennan Mears addressed the meeting via speakerphone.
Geving called the meeting to order at 7:10 PM.
At the start of the meeting, Mears addressed the Board via speakerphone. He related information from Town Attorney Strom regarding the Phillips cartway. Mears said that, although the cartway is technically a road, it cannot be used for frontage purposes. However, it can be used for access, and it is not a driveway. Therefore there is no issue regarding more than two homes being accessed by a single driveway. It is a public road but not an improved public road. Existing easements are irrelevant to the application. The lot in question has been in existence since 1953.
A document prepared by LeAnn Brown, a former Lakewood Zoning Administrator, was presented to the Board. The document, current as of 9/2/05, was a map of the cartway including ownership and easements. The Phillips cartway and existing overlapping easements can be used to access the property, and this satisfies the ordinance requirement for evidence of easements to the property. However, because the road is not publicly maintained, a road maintenance agreement must be entered into and presented to the Board by the applicant. Finally, the Phillips road or cartway cannot be vacated by the Town because of the number of parcels it serves.
After the speakerphone conversation, Geving asked for a motion to approve the minutes of the previous Board of Adjustment meeting on December 12th at which two variances were discussed. Motion by Leider, second by Cutts, to approve the minutes for the Superior Savings Bank hearing. Motion carried with the recorder noting that the name of the person representing Superior Savings Bank was Loren Johnston. (Mr. Johnston was again present at the current hearing on December 19th.) Motion by Leider, second by Cutts, to approve the minutes of the Wendy Robertson hearing. Motion carried.
Mr. Johnston presented a document to the Board entitled Exceptions (File Number 1207026) that dealt with the history of easements to the property.
Leider then addressed the question of whether the applicant had complied with page 49 of the current ordinance in completing a notarized covenant that addressed all of the issues specified on that page. The Board concluded that the requirements of Article VI, Section 1.01, J#3a had been satisfied, but that the requirements of J#3b had not. Cutts agreed that the covenant specified in J#3b must be available at the hearing to be reviewed by the Board. Leider noted that item J#3c makes clear that the signed and notarized covenant and easement must be filed with the Town Clerk prior to the variance hearing. Motion by Cutts, second by Leider, to deny the variance appeal because the signed and notarized covenant that should accompany the application was lacking. Motion carried. Following the vote, Leider noted that the variance hearing should not have occurred because the application was not fully documented. He said that this should be taken into consideration when considering fees if the applicant makes a new variance appeal.
A brief discussion of the meaning of Article IV, Section 3.05, A#2 followed the Board’s decision. In particular, the vagueness of the term “separate ownership” was considered. Leider and Geving expressed the opinion that this simply meant that the parcel had not been split off from another larger lot since 1973. An alternative interpretation could be that the current owners of the parcel must not own or have owned abutting lots since 1973.
Motion by Geving, second by Cutts, to adjourn the public hearing. The meeting was adjourned at 8:17 PM
Respectfully submitted,
David Gerhart