Tonight (September 8, 2008) at 7:00 p.m. the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) will once again meet at Emerson Middle School in Niles to review and consider City Staff’s proposed homeless shelter Text Amendment to the City’s Zoning Ordinance that would enable the issuance of special use permits for homeless shelters like the one PADS wants to run out of St. Paul of the Cross School. 

Prior to August 25th, Staff proposed its original draft of the Text Amendment that included only the most minimal requirements for the applicant seeking a homeless shelter special use permit.  On August 25th, P&Z held a three-hour hearing to obtain public testimony about what additional considerations and requirements might be included in the process for a shelter obtaining a special use permit.  Much of that “testimony” was opinion rather than fact, but a number of facts were presented.

One might expect that Staff might find something in that three hours of resident testimony to justify even some minor adjustments to the original Text Amendment.  But, amazingly enough, Staff’s post-public hearing version of the Text Amendment is exactly the same as the original.  

In other words, Staff derived nothing from those three hours of citizen input that caused it to re-think and revise any aspect of its original draft Text Amendment.  Is Staff just so good that it doesn’t even need citizen input, or was that citizen input just so poor that Staff was justified in disregarding it?  We believe neither.

We have annotated the September 8, 2008, Text Amendment memorandum [pdf] from Acting Director of Community Preservation and Development Carrie Davis to point out just how shallow, incomplete and undocumented Staff’s “analysis” of the Text Amendment is.  Frankly, it’s little more than a collection of Staff’s (or somebody else’s?) substantially unfounded opinions and conclusions that pretty much ignore the nine “Standards” for zoning text amendments found at Table 1 to Section 4.8.E of the Zoning Ordinance – including the crucial criterion of whether this proposed Text Amendment “will benefit the residents of the City as a whole, and not just the applicant, property owner(s)…or other special interest groups.”  We include an annotated Table 1 with the September 8th memo.

Carrie Davis should be ashamed of releasing such a piece of fluff under her name, but we’re guessing she’s just playing typical bureaucrat and following somebody’s orders.  Over the years we’ve observed that half-baked bureacratic “work product” from Staff usually signals that some kind of “Fix” is in, for some special interest or another at the expense of the rest of our community. 

But we encourage you to read the relevant materials, form your own opinions, and show up at Emerson tonight to see whether those P&Z members – all of whom we understand to be either appointments or re-appointments by our pro-PADS Mayor Howard Frimark – will rubber-stamp Carrie Davis’ fluff or actually stand up for “the residents of the City as a whole”?

As usual, we’re not holding our breath.

Update (9/9/08):

By a final vote of 7-2, P&Z last night forwarded the proposed Text Amendment to the Park Ridge City Council, but with one significant addition: No homeless shelter shall be located within 500 feet of a school.  By the slimmest 5-4 margin, Commissioners Anita Rifkind, Aurora Abella-Austriaco, Lou Arrigoni, Cathy Piche and Milda Roskiewicz stressed public safety in advocating and voting for this requirement, while chairman Alfredo Marr and commissioners Joe Baldi, Tom Provenchar and Mary Wells voted against the requirement.

The conduct of the meeting often seemed like Roberts Rules of Order meet the Marx Brothers, especially when the 500-foot requirement was being discussed: Chairman Marr put off a vote on it as long as possible, first taking a break to privately huddle with City Attorney Buzz Hill and Acting Director of Community Preservation and Development Carrie Davis, then inviting more discussion, then asking for a show of hands (which reflected the final 5-4 majority) before finally asking for a motion and calling the formal vote. 

The Text Amendment now moves on to the City Council, six members of which were in the audience for at least part of the meeting: P&Z liaison Dave Schmidt (1st) and Aldermen Don Bach (3rd), Jim Allegretti (4th), Robert Ryan (5th), Tom Carey (6th) and Frank Wsol (7th).