Wilmette trustees won’t immediately get advice on how to reduce absentee rates on the village’s zoning board of appeals, or consider other ways to prevent those absences from slowing the progress of zoning cases.
The village board’s land use committee met Oct. 30 to consider the issue, but decided to get more guidance from village attorney Jeff Stein on whether Wilmette could legally add one more person to the seven-person ZBA.
Having eight ZBA members on the zoning body might make it more possible to ensure seven members could attend meetings and decide cases, trustees on the committee agreed.
The committee – chair Steve Leonard and members Kathy Dodd and Dan Sullivan – were less enthusiastic about another idea suggested by Community Development Director John Adler. Adler said the village board could change its own voting requirements on ZBA cases, making it easier for trustees to approve cases with simple majority votes.
However, former Village President Chris Canning told committee members it would be better for them to focus on changing voting requirements than on increasing the number of ZBA members.
“Both of my predecessors, presidents (John) Jacoby and (Nancy) Canafax, said one of the hardest things they had to do was find people to serve on the zoning board,” he said.
Sullivan, a former zoning board chair, raised the attendance issue with the village board earlier this year. He said some low-attendance ZBA sessions ultimately led to case delays, with residents postponing ZBA hearings in an effort to be heard before a larger ZBA complement.
High ZBA absences, according to Assistant Community Development Director Lisa Roberts, raise the possibility of zoning cases getting a technical negative recommendation.
Wilmette’s village code requires the ZBA to send any decision with fewer than four positive votes to village trustees as a negative recommendation. That means even if a majority of ZBA members at a low-attendance meeting say they favor the case, a 3-1 or 3-2 positive vote still goes to village trustees with an official thumbs-down.
Village code then mandates that if trustees want to overturn the “negative” recommendation – in effect, honoring the actual positive vote – they need to muster a super-majority of five votes to do so.
Adler said that changing the board vote requirement in some fashion would allow trustees to overturn negative recommendations without a super-majority. And that, according to Roberts earlier this year, could convince people not to ask for delays at either the ZBA or board level.
Patrick Duffy, who chairs the zoning board, told committee members that he supported finding more ZBA members rather than changing voting requirements, at least at his board’s level. He said it would be better to add one full-time member rather than appoint members as alternates.
He acknowledged it is difficult to recruit ZBA members, or to ensure their attendance once they are on the body.
Leonard said Wilmette officials might need to step up recruitment efforts.
After the meeting, Adler said the village attorney still needed to give an opinion on whether Wilmette could legally hike ZBA membership to eight, and still keep the number of voting members at seven.
“In this case, we need to know, is it possible to have eight members, seven of who will attend and vote,” he said. “From the staff point of view, what are the pros and cons of that?”
Adler said the village can already theoretically change voting requirements. Among the ways that could work, he said, would be to mandate that only ZBA cases that netted four “no” votes would require a super-majority of trustee votes to overturn. Any case that had fewer than four “no” votes could be overturned with a simple majority at the village board level, he said.
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The land use committee has not set its next meeting date, Adler said.
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