Subdivision Approval Raises Questions About Zoning Codes, Interpretation

The Vienna Town Council approved a two-lot, re-subdivision on Glyndon Street SE at its regular meeting this week, but with it came a promise to tighten some codes developers have "stretched" and interpreted to work around certain regulations.

The application, filed by Anthony Venafro of Smith Engineering for Ayrhill Homes, who owns the property, will take the lot formerly marked as 208 Glyndon Street SE and transform it into two single-family detached residential lots. Each lot will have a two-story, single family home.

When the preliminary plans for the subdivision first came to the planning commission this fall, planning commissioners worried the application was "pushing the envelope" on lot coverage, drainage and minimum lot width.

Those items "comply with the written rule of law" but "they do not comply with the spirit of the law," Planning Commission Chair David Miller wrote in a memo to the council.

Planning and Zoning Director Greg Hembree echoed those concerns to the council Monday night.

"Like everything else in town, we've gone from lot coverage of 11 to 12 percent to now hitting the maximum [of 25 percent]," Hembree said.

Hembree said he it wasn't the first time builders and architects have tested the limits of the town's code. He said he's seen things like entire second stories cantilevered over the first floor, some coming across the front setback lines; bay windows, which fall under "other architectural features," have evolved from bumped out windows with seats to full, walkout rooms.  The feature and others like it, which are not constricted by lot coverage or height restrictions, "are being used, in part, to extend certain living areas of the new homes," he wrote in a memo to the council.

One of those features included in the Ayr Hill Homes application was a seven-foot cupola, which will make the 30-foot structure stand above imposed by the town because it is an architectural feature and not technically part of the building itself.

"We've worked very hard for several years to keep height down and here we are popping it up," Councilman Howard Springsteen said.

While the commission recommended council approve the application, it also forwarded a memo detailing several legislative changes the council should consider going forward.

Among them was lot shape. The lot in the Glyndon Street application wasn't wide enough for a “front-to-back” lot split, so the developer "gerrymandered" the shape of the lot in order to meet regulations, including the addition of  "a 10- foot-wide appendage that I have referred to as the Oklahoma Panhandle," Hembree wrote in the memo. Staff uses a formula that considers perimeter and area to assign a lot shape factor for each property in the county, and requires a special exception for those that exceed a certain number. In Vienna, no similar regulation exists, Hembree said.

"We need more legislative help in that regard," Hembree said.

The Council will examine some of those proposed adjustments in a future work session.

"We have to accept [this plan]," Councilwoman Laurie Cole said, addressing a resident who had opposed the application because of the way it stretched town code. "Unfortunately, the only way we can test the limits of interpretations of an ordinance is when we get the project that says 'this meets the definition,’ so that then challenges us to revisit those definitions to get something that produces buildings that everyone in the neighborhood is satisfied with."