It took more than two hours to decide, but Wilmette’s village board agreed Dec. 13 to let a Laurel Avenue couple continue using their back yard patio as an occasional parking pad.
Chris and Stacey Woehrle, of the 700 block of Laurel, will have to narrow the informal driveway apron they use to drive onto the patio, planting grass on the unused portion and limiting themselves to parking only one vehicle on the pad, trustees decided. They also told the couple to work with Community Development Director John Adler to find a more acceptable permeable surface for the remaining apron than the gravel now being used.
The decision was a compromise reached after the Woehrles, trustees, and Adler went around and around on what Wilmette’s zoning code would define as a parking pad, either currently or as the code was written before 2014.
The case, which is officially a request by the couple for zoning variations to turn their existing patio into a parking pad, underwent nine postponements since the zoning board of appeals first recommended denying the request in September 2015, most often because the petitioners couldn’t attend scheduled board meetings. Last month trustees postponed it again, to give the Woehrles a chance to plead their case.
In November, Adler told the board the existing patio, which was built in 2009 as a patio, could be legal if the gravel apron connecting it to an adjacent alley was removed, and if landscaping could prevent cars from reaching it. The owners could also legally park one car next to a smaller patio, if they got a zoning variance to that end, he said at the time.
Adler repeated that on Dec. 13. He said records show the Woehrles originally asked for permits to build a parking pad, but changed the request and received a permit for their patio, after staff told them that zoning code would not support a parking pad.
The homeowners said they rarely parked two cars on the patio, and said their children and neighborhood children more often used it for the recreational purposes for which a patio would be used. A slide presentation they showed the board indicated that they parked a car on the patio on many occasions: when area parking was crowded because of Northwestern University’s seven football games, roughly seven times a year during village leaf collection days, another estimated 10 times a year after heavy rains, and while loading and unloading cumbersome items.
The Woehrles insisted that they had not knowingly violated village zoning rules. The case only came up for debate because the couple in 2015 asked for a permit to create a concrete apron in place of the gravel apron, Stacey Woehrle said.
However, Village President Bob Bielinski, citing Adler’s comments about the original 2009 patio permit request, said, “It sounded like staff told you that you couldn’t do what you ended up doing.”
Adler said the patio met zoning guidelines as long as it wasn’t used for parking; it could also be a legal parking pad, with only a variation needed, but only if the existing surface was reduced by roughly six feet in length, he said.
The discussion occasionally appeared to confuse everyone involved, leading to unexpectedly odd conversations.
“Why are you calling it a parking pad?” Trustee Ted McKenna asked Adler as the latter tried to explain definitions for both types of construction.
“Because it’s being parked on,” Adler responded.
McKenna argued during the debate that the Woehrles’ neighbors had indicated support for the patio-parking pad combination, and said he did not think it caused harm to the neighborhood. He also disagreed with trustees, like Ducommun, who initially argued that allowing the Woehrles to continue to park on what was technically a patio would set a bad precedent, and encourage similar future cases.
More Top Picks Pole Saw
“Our zoning code … is an imperfect process,” McKenna said. “I view our role as trying to improve the lives of all the residents of Wilmette, not just hassle them.”
“I believe we need to respect our zoning code,” Ducommun said, adding that the couples’ neighbors might support them, but might not understand the zoning code, or the challenges of trying to make it work equally for the entire village.
“I think our opinion holds more weight in my book,” she said, before acknowledging that forcing the Woehrles to tear out any or all of the patio would be “impracticable.” Because of that, she said she would support the compromise, which was first broached by Trustee Cameron Krueger.
McKenna was the only trustee to vote against the compromise measure. Bielinski, Ducommun, Krueger, and Trustees Dan Sullivan, Julie Wolf and Senta Plunkett voted for it.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy