Through the years of covering the Harrisburg Zoning Hearing Board, I’ve learned two important things.
Lesson one: Come prepared. Board members are veterans and, in fact, may be the most competent in their jobs of any group of city officials. They’ve seen it all and heard it all. They have no patience for b.s., and you’re not going to get anything by them.
Lesson two: If they want to see a project succeed, they’ll bend over backwards to make it happen. If they don’t like a project, they’ll find every reason to deny it.
Oh, yes, there’s a third lesson: Lessons one and two are closely correlated.
Case in point — The application under consideration today by Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the city’s oldest African-American churches, with roots dating back to 1835.
Bethel AME is located in the 1700-block of N. 5th Street, but only because its former location at N. 6th and Herr streets, about a mile away, burned down in 1995, and it’s that location that was up for debate today. Bethel’s new pastor, the Rev. Micah Sims, would like to put the vacant land to profitable use, namely as a surface parking lot, believing that its location near the Capitol complex could generate significant revenue.
However, such a use for that location is not permitted under the city’s zoning code, meaning the church needed to get a special exception from the zoning board.
First up: Sims and several members of Bethel AME. They explained the long, impressive history of the church, but, in the end, that wasn’t going to make any difference to the board. Members sat there patiently waiting for the applicants to get to the issue at hand: use of the land for parking.
“I don’t believe we should have the lot just sitting there until we determine what the lot will do five to 10 years from now,” said Sims.
Oh, wrong answer.
That is not what zoning board members wanted to hear. Sure, a few members of the Old Fox Ridge neighborhood group proceeded to speak against the parking plan, but it probably didn’t matter. The fact that the church clearly had no plan to put this well-located land to better use sealed the fate of the special exception.
The board unanimously denied the request.
So the parcel at the corner of N. 6th and Herr streets will sit vacant until the church decides to either develop the land, which seems unlikely, or sell it.
To the activists of Old Fox Ridge, that seemed like the best outcome, as having a large surface lot in the midst of their neighborhood for the next decade was intolerable. It also was not acceptable to members of the zoning board, a valuable piece of information that church members would have been wise to know going in.
