Closed For Business?

Why our Main Street Will Die With Zoning!

Ask yourself this simple question: How important is a vibrant Main Street to a community like Windham? Communities without vibrant Main Streets are dead ghost towns. A recent Overlook News article about the embattled Phoenicia hamlet in the Town of Shandaken, called “Death by A Thousand Cuts in Phoenicia,” nicely pointed out how areas with a stagnating or declining Main Street show larger patterns of decline. We see that in the Town of Hunter, our close mountaintop neighbor that has empty buildings on its Main Street, reduced economic growth. The same can be said for many local towns in this region of New York. And Windham is sadly rushing headlong into a future where Main Street will stagnate and decline due to the current zoning proposal’s hostility towards commercial activities.

It’s hard to imagine a business district as restrictive as proposed in our current zoning proposal. And yet, that is exactly what our Zoning Commission has created with regulations on the Business district. Here is the complete list of usages on our main street that will require special permits within our Business district:

• School

• Farm Stand

• Agribusiness

• Artisan Manufacturing

• Assisted Living

• Auto/Truck Repair

• Auto/Truck Sales

• Bulk Fuel and Storage Sales

• Car Wash

• Commerican Event Venue ( A location used for events such as Parties, Weddings, or Meetings for a fee in a location that includes the following structurs tents, gazebos, barns, and residential structures.)

• Commercial Recreation (e.g. roller skating, indoor shooting range, indoor golf, and so on)

• Day Care Center

• Equipment Rental (yes, those pesky Bulldozers and Tractors again)

• Farmers Market (non-Permanent)

• Farm Implements or Sales

• Funeral Homes

• Gasoline Service Stations (I’m assuming Diesel and Kerosene are also lumped into this category )

• Medical or Dental Facilities

• Personal Service Establishments ( e.g. barbers, tailors, dry cleaners, etc. )

• Private School ( No definition in the law exists for this category, which is a problem).

• Retail Sales (e.g. Retail establishments, completely enclosed within structures, engaged in selling goods or merchandise to the general public)

• Theaters

• Veterinary Hospitals
  

I ask you this simple question: “Would you attempt to start a business knowing that our Business District is this restrictive”? Simple activities that any business district should, by definition, allow, such as retail, medical or dental facilities, farm stands, theaters, auto/truck repairs, schools, and so on, all require more scrutiny and cost to engage in the future if this zoning proposal is passed. Are we creating a business atmosphere that says “Open for Business”? Or one that tells our potential investors in our community, “Closed for Business”? That is the question, is it not?

To me, the ideal concept for our community is to create a planning commission that understands how to create growth. We need growth that will be able to support local businesses on Main Street with families that live on our Main Street and frequent our businesses. We need to make Windham affordable and capable of supporting local business growth without needless regulatory pressures on our business owners. We need to create an environment that incubates local talent and allows them to create vibrant business opportunities for our community. Instead, our current zoning plan makes commercial development nearly impossible, strangling it in the cradle with parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, maximum number of units per building, and regulations for loading and unloading docks.

A recent post on Facebook shows people would love a smaller space than the 400 sq. ft. required by our new zoning proposal once adopted. These nonconforming spaces of 100-399 sq ft in floor area will not fit within our new area regulations in the new Zoning Proposal once adopted. In short, if you want a 150-399sq-ft office space after the Zoning Proposal is adopted and none exist, you will only get 400 sq-ft choices. This sounds trivial to some, but it isn’t. If you are on a budget that is tight for your new start-up business and they are renting office space at $5.00 per square foot, then a 150 sq-ft office is $750.00 per month, while the larger 400 sq-ft office is $2,000 per month. The extra $1,250 in rental fees per month might be the difference between you opening your business in Windham or moving your business and perhaps your home to another community that is less restrictive and thus cheaper. Make no mistake, these types of increases in costs are exactly what our zoning proposal creates by creating floor area minimum standards. This is by design, not by necessity.

If our community is going to thrive, it will need two things: workforce/affordable housing and Jobs. If we cannot employ people in our community, nor house them, they will leave our community looking for these opportunities. Our current zoning proposal is all about creating only one type of growth in our community, at the exclusion of everything else, the Mini-Luxury Estate. We cannot allow our Main Street to perish just to satisfy one small group within our Community. That is myopic at best and at worst, totally destructive for our community’s long-term existence to isolate ourselves from growth.

Instead, we need to create strong long-term plans for our community that will allow it to grow and develop organically. That embraces both current residents and transplant residents who wish to become local members of our community. The only way to do this is to embrace policies that create fewer of the wrong type of regulations and more growth. The wrong type of regulations for Windham are those that limit access to potential building sites due to parking minimums, minimum floor area requirements, height requirements, setbacks, and so on. We have to ask ourselves, do we wish to break the cycle of growth and decline? Or do we wish to be slaves to the cycle of growth and decline because we aren’t willing to break out of our comfortable patterns of thinking? Instead, we must embrace change so our community can maintain stable growth for generations to come.