Wheaton City Council cleans up zoning conflict

Wheaton City Council members cleaned up a city zoning quirk Monday night that may have at least two positive impacts Monday night.

Up until now, the city's zoning and subdivision laws were often at odds in terms of how large property lots must be and how far away structures on those lots should be setback from streets and other property lots.

The city council, in a planning session, directed staff to shift all the substantive size requirements to the zoning ordinance. That would essentially delete almost all requests by developers to deviate from the subdivision requirements. And, when developers do feel the need to deviate from the law, they'll have one set of guidelines to build a case.

The law changes will most likely result in fewer situations where corner lots on a street have massive homes that don't match the rest of the homes on the block. In fact, the law change will probably result in fewer corner lots being subdivided at all. Corner lots are typically larger overall. The city already addressed this issue in a previous code change.

The law changes may also shrink the overall number of requests developers make to deviate from city code in development projects. Many of the city council's disagreements in recent years have stemmed from situations where developers want to do a project that doesn't quite confirm to the city's spacing standards.

Some council members, notably Phil Suess, have been adamantly opposed to granting such deviations in situations where a developer is molding a property free of any structures either through demolition or otherwise.

The code still leaves plenty of wiggle room for the city council to deem what projects are worthy of deviations from the codes on a case-by-case basis.

Suess deemed the code changes "an elegant solution" to a confusing problem for developers and the council.