As we ponder all of the General Plan Amendment requests in progress, we wondered: "What in the history of the LOVE Blog can speak to this?" After all, we've been publishing for almost five years so there must be something in the past from which we can learn.
Was there another time and another Oro Valley Town Council facing these decisions?
We went back to October of 2007 and found a posting from our late friend, Zev Cywan, that spoke exactly to this. Zev refers to former Mayor Loomis in this post. Today it is more than just the Mayor, it is the rest of the super-majority who may be on a path to breaking their agreements with us... agreements grounded in our General Plan, in our PAD's and in our Zoning Codes... to do the bidding of their special interests.
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WHAT WAS THAT?
Was it a ‘tweak’, was it a ‘variance’, was it a
‘text amendment’ or was it subterfuge!? What was it that gave the Town
Council the right to spot raise the height limit and change a ‘permitted
use’ in order to accommodate the will of an hotel developer? Our
esteemed Zoning Administrator and some others labeled it a ‘text
amendment;' it cannot be a ‘text amendment’ according to both state and
local ‘constitutional’ definitions. It was referred to on several
instances as a ‘variance’; it cannot be a variance as it does not meet
the ‘variance’ qualifications. In other contexts it was referred to as a
'tweak.' So, was it a tweak? What IS a tweak? It was stated (and
accepted by the Mayor and Council) that because the zoning rules and
regs were 20 years old, occasionally it was necessary to ‘tweak’ them in
order to keep up with the times; area ‘X’ was ‘tweaked’, area ‘Y’ was
‘tweaked’, area ‘Z’ was ‘tweaked’; therefor it’s OK to ‘tweak’ whatever
needs to be ‘tweaked.'
Yet, interestingly enough, the Mayor
defends ... ‘tweaking’ the ‘old’ Rancho
Vistoso PAD plan ‘as needed’, and thus plays willy nilly with our rules
and regs, our processes, and viciously tramples on the public’s RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE in it’s governance by denying and defying our right to due
process.
Zev Cywan
2007
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