From the sound of Andrea's December 16 liveblog from the City Plan Commission, not to mention the myriad other sit-downs Angela Hunt and Pauline Medrano have had with Lower Greenville Avenue stakeholders in recent months, the council members' Planned Development District ordinance has a lot of support, even if it means paying for a specific use permit to keep doors open past midnight. "The unified support for this effort is unprecedented in Lower Greenville," wrote Hunt but two weeks ago.
Which isn't to say that support is unanimous: Back in July, the newly formed Lowest Lower Greenville Avenue Business Association (whose website doesn't say who's a member) said it was "extremely concerned" about the ordinance and demanded a meeting with the council members; a few days later, the Greenville Avenue Restaurant Association sent Hunt, Medrano and Mayor Tom Leppert a missive saying it's "unfair to include in the Planned Development District legitimate business activities."
Then again, it can be a little hard to keep track of the yays and nays. Because this morning I went back and read Schutze's March column on what ails Lower Greenville, and property owners Marc and Roger Andres were very much against the SUPs, while a certain Barking Dog was all for a clean sweep. As in: "If they don't make the decision to really improve this area the way
they say they want to, together, it's not going to happen," said Avi Adelman. "The patchwork
approach doesn't work."
But then Marc showed up to plan commission two weeks ago and threw his support behind the ordinance: "We're very excited about this opportunity going forward." Meanwhile, Adelman's got a new website up called StopthePD.com.
The new site echoes a post on his own website last week
in which he wrote, "The City ignored Lowest Greenville for 12+ years,
letting things go until they were so bad as to implode into a hail of
gunfire."
The StopthePD site, which comes with a
fill-in-the-blanks protest letter ready to send to council, insists the
ordinance will wreak "economic oblivion" upon Lower Greenville and
"penalizes a business for doing the right thing." An excerpt, but with
the council not scheduled to vote on the ordinance till next month or
February, you've got time to read the whole thing:
If this proposal passes, Lowest Greenville will be an economic-dead zone for years. Other business districts will be threatened with similar rules if their patrons misbehave. And long-time businesses on the street -- many of whom are not part of the problem -- will close their doors for good.
It took five years for positive changes to take place in Deep Ellum, with a minimal amount of residential areas around it. Can we afford to wait that long while the Lowest Greenville neighborhood (nearly 5,000 homes) takes a hit for the benefit of a few commercial property owners waiting to make a profit?
