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Roland Week:	>.
President. Associate Puansher
Ben R. Morris
Publisher
i
Robert P. McHugh	James J. Lund
Editor	fditor
Thursday, August 27, 1981
Opinion
Bay St. Louis zoning mess is a call to action
A review of the zoning history of the City of Bay St. Louis is enough to land a roomful of somber citizens on the floor laughing helplessly.
Adopted in 1964, the code, together with an official zoning map, classified all areas of the city residential except land fronting on U.S. 90. All commercial and industrial firms existing were allowed to remain, under a grandfather clause. If a business closed, a similar business had to reopen within six months or that property would revert to residential zoning.
It sounds simple enough except that the ?sixties? and ?seventies? were a time of economic expansion and city fathers everywhere were working at attracting the new motels, apartment complexes and the lei-sure-time businesses dear to the hearts of tourist communities.
Bay St. Louis properties changed from residential to commercial zoning a chunk at a time, as the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council handled one after anothervBut nobody was updating the code with these exceptions and nobody was changing the ?official? zoning map. By the time somebody remembered the map, it couldn?t be found.
Two attempts in recent years ?' to create and adopt an official map by updating the map that is mounted impressively on the wall over the seat of the president of the;cUy council, ended i in uproars.
Citizens were invited to come |
I see the map and contribute in-I formation about any changes it I needed. On both occasions property-owners misunderstood the purpose of the invitation and came to public meetings with their groans about the incorrect listings of * their businesses or their neighborhoods on the city map. And I with no updated lists of code
^?changes, the commission had j no way to agree with or to refute their claims.	j
In November, the city ob-tained an updating of the code ? itself, with every change buried j in City Council minutes pulled out and duly catalogued. But there's still no map. Some legal , j authorities claim now that i without an official map, the j zoning code is moot.
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*	The latest zoning flap came earlier this month when New Orleans musician Pete Fountain had a fence erected around his six-lot property at the water?s edge next to the Bay Bridge. A search by the city fathers turned up a 1972 ordinance prohibiting structures and another passed shortly afterwards exempting Fountain?s property. A week after the fence was built, the city at torney opined that both or dinances were void. The firs was not filed properly; the sec ond assigned the wrong num bers to two of Fountain's lots The inevitable flap at a City Council meeting over having no laws at all governing beach construction turned up this eye-popper: an 1886 ordinance that requires city government approval for any construction on the beach.
The flaps and flops will not end until the city moves ahead with creation of a zoning map based on all its up-dated zoning information. The council might begin by alloting some funds to the Planning and Zoning Commission, which operates without a cent of budget. Three years ago, commission president Paul Vegas suggested that the Council eliminate the commission, since its work was disregarded anyhow. ?You have no need of our services,? he said then.
Until there?s a solid, comprehensive ordinance with a map to match, perhaps Vegas is right.