A new business zone allowing retail uses is in the works for an area around the intersection of Routes 7 and 35, where an eclectic mix of businesses already exists.
“The Neighborhood Business Zone is established to promote opportunities for mixed uses including retail stores of limited size, restaurants, offices, and other businesses providing goods and services to town residents in the vicinity of the Route 7 and Route 35 intersection in northeast Ridgefield,” the proposal says.
“The zone also provides for apartments over businesses, and architectural and site design standards for all development in this important entryway into the Town of Ridgefield.”
The proposed “Neighborhood Business Zone,” or “NBZ,” is not a finished product, and no public hearing date has been set. But Town Planner Betty Brosius said she and the Planning and Zoning Commission are working toward a hearing in early March, possibly March 8.
The new zone would affect six properties totaling just under five acres, including the Valero gas station, the Patio.com outdoor furniture store at the point of the intersection, and businesses south of the patio furniture store that front on Route 7 down to John’s Best Pizza and on Route 35 down to the Bring and Buy building.
The area is currently a B-2 business zone, which permits offices, restaurants and a variety of other business uses, but not retail stores.
The proposed zone is a much less ambitious proposal than the “Gateway Zone” that was adopted in the Route 7 and Route 35 area in 2013, challenged by citizens and village business owners opposed to it, and thrown out by a judge on technical grounds in March 2015. The Gateway Zone included some 35 properties covering 57 acres, compared to the Neighborhood Business Zone’s six properties and five acres.
“We’re not trying to revisit a smaller version of The Gateway,” said Planning and Zoning Commission Chairwoman Rebecca Mucchetti. “The commission sees this as an opportunity to bring some of the non-conforming properties into conformance with the zoning regulations.”
Many of the properties in the five-acre area are what zoning-speak describes as “legal non-conforming” business uses, and the proposal is to bring them into “conformity” by adjusting the regulations to recognize what’s already there and allow those uses.
“Approximately 42% of these uses are either pre-existing and legally non-conforming, permitted by variance, or illegal,” said Brosius.
“The new zone is intended to bring these properties into conformance with the zoning regulations, to permit small-scale retail uses, to permit apartments over businesses, and to ensure that future changes to these properties will fall under the review of the Planning and Zoning Commission,” she said.
“Design standards for development have been included, as well as regulations that promote inter-connection of parking lots, reduced road cuts, and improved walkability between buildings.”
Adopting the proposal would, of course, allow other properties in the new zone to change to the newly legal permitted uses, including retail, and properties might be redeveloped under the new rules.
Property owners had expressed frustration that they have potential tenants, but their retail uses aren’t allowed even though there are other retail operations next door, Mucchetti said.
“That area of town used to include retail — zoning allowed it, and we changed our regulations, I think in the early 70s,” she said.
Ellen Burns, owner of Books on the Common and one of the plaintiffs who appealed the adoption of the Gateway Zone, said she was aware the commission was working on a new zone for the 7 and 35 area, but hadn’t looked into the details yet.
“We’ll definitely be looking at it and following what they’re proposing,” she said.
“I need to get more information about what they’re proposing and what the rationale is.”
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