Friday, May 15, 2015

Victim Of Success?

Mission Cantina, 485 West Street, South Amherst

A bit of a firefight erupted at the Zoning Board of Appeals hearing last night over a Special Permit for the wildly successful Mexican restaurant in South Amherst, Mission Cantina.  Mainly over parking.

Attorney Kristi Bodin in a memo called the proposed actions of the board "arbitrary & capricious" and capped of her verbal presentation last night by branding it "really, really disturbing."

The restaurant, she pointed out, has a seating capacity of 49 and the zoning bylaw calls for one parking spot per 4 seats so they are only required to have 12, but in fact have 26.

 Click to enlarge/read

So to require them to provide (3) additional new parking spaces when all they wanted was permission to build an 8 foot fence to shield their immediate residential neighbor and add a vestibule in the front of the building (for energy savings in the winter) was a tad maddening. 

ZBA member Tom Ehrgood, who bristled at the word "capricious," pointed out that they were also requesting a doubling of employee parking in back, and permission to park the sizable Taco Truck

Taco truck and employee parking in the rear

The food truck operation is what tripped Building Commissioner Rob Morra's attention.  The original Special Permit that allowed the restaurant to open has nothing in the management plan to address the operation of the food truck on site, which loads up at the restaurant in the early evening and then returns in the early morning hours.

And Mr. Morra also thought the addition of the vestibule where patrons could stand while waiting for a table increases the capacity of the building (even though seating remains at 49) thus creating a "change in use" that requires its own Special Permit.

The ZBA seemed willing to compromise and liked the idea of both the vestibule and fence but since most of them have patronized the restaurant they know first hand there's a problem at peak time with parking.

Building Commissioner Morra could not be at the meeting last night to explain his findings, so the hearing was continued until June 4.  And by the end of last night's hearing, a Mexican standoff had been avoided as they had come to mutually agreeable terms:
1) Mission Cantina would submit a revised site plan removing the "new" parking spaces and showing eight (8) employee spaces and one (1) taco truck space behind the restaurant, 2) Mission would submit a plan to delineate the edge of the parking area on the south side of the building to prevent parking on the grass or dirt next to the lot; as well as a plan to inform patrons that parking on unpaved areas was not allowed; 3) Mission would provide a change to the management plan for the taco truck revising the hours to 3 am at the latest for clean up, and 4) Mission would provide a change to the fencing material from stockade fencing to some type of solid panel.

Red box indicates where 3 "new" parking spaces would have been located.  

 Business neighbor to north not interested in leasing out parking spaces

37 comments:

  1. "Mexican standoff" is a racial slur. Just call it a standoff, and don't try to be so cute.

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  2. Success must be punished.

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  3. Typical Amherst idiocy…a business is flourishing so we must stifle it. smh

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    1. Remember the Dear Leader's view of budiness: "You didn't build that." And people still drive around with Obama bumper stickers.

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    2. Hey! She gypped me! (Slur.)I'm Mexican. Can you explain how 'Mexican Standoff' is a slur? It never bothered me. Why you?

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  4. Maybe the should relocate to that Montague site they were looking at.

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  5. If only Amherst had an economic development coordinator on staff. I'm sure that would help.

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  6. So- If the town is fine without parking for the new downtown apt complexes and businesses-
    How can they require other Amherst businesses to provide more spaces than are required???

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  7. So what do you think of the PC crap that equates Irish with drinking? Your idea of PC crap is someone else's idea of a slur.

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    1. What makes your politics more correct than mine?

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  8. I think you're pretty overly sensitive for a Cowardly Anon Nitwit.

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  9. This business has a parking problem. Just ask Sibies, which has to put up with people parking in all kinds of places that are not marked spaces. It's a mess.

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  10. Planning for peak hour parking resolves one problem while compounding many others.

    The current google maps image of the place is sad, with over 50% of that land in surface lots.

    They could do better. To bad the political will is missing...



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  11. I wonder what is happening here... lol

    https://www.google.com/maps/@42.340036,-72.520224,3a,65.8y,222.31h,90.07t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s9LN0vvprERVq30jIa9Jpzw!2e0

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  12. From The Word Detective:

    "Several sources I have found suggest that the “Mexican” modifier in the phrase refers to a supposed proclivity of 19th century Mexican “bandits” for running away from a fair fight. But the first example of “Mexican standoff” found so far in print used the phrase to describe a baseball game ending in a tie, and subsequent uses employ the term as a simple synonym of “stalemate” with nary an actual Mexican in sight. The “Mexican” in “Mexican standoff” is thus almost certainly just another entry in the long and shameful roster of US slang terms employing “Mexican” as a slur meaning “fraudulent, inferior, or marked by poverty, poor sanitation, lack of sophistication or ignorance.” Such formations as “Mexican bankroll” (one large denomination bill wrapped around a roll of smaller bills), “Mexican athlete” (a phony braggart) and “Mexican breakfast” (a cigarette and a glass of water) all reflect the same derogatory national rivalry. A “Mexican standoff,” in this light, is called “Mexican” because it is pointless, inconclusive and unproductive, not because it has any actual connection to Mexico."

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  13. "Methinks thou doth protest too much."

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  14. I actually found Anon 8:00's post really interesting. It is you Larry who seems to protest too much.

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  15. Morra has issues with this but is fine with approving buildings with no parking and ten feet higher than the regulations.

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  16. As I was once told by Mass State Rep Emile Goguen right before exiting his office and throwing up on the sidewalk.

    "If you can pay your bills, I am not taxing you enough"

    I proceeded to let go a few employees and replace them by machines to pay his taxes. This was about 10 years ago.

    He is now deceased and should never have been in office....but Amherst shares his vision of taxation and government predation....and the same need for replacement and revision of regulations to let people keep and use their property.

    Surely no one from Amherst government will be eating there again. They can try, but I can only imagine what will be done to their food (given what is done to the average person's food in most restaurant kitchens). In fact, I would imagine that Amherst employees should use caution at eating out in town anywhere....like police have learned to because of the vengeance that is sought against them for their fellow officers actions.

    I guess Amherst employees like eating at home....or don't mind spit and butt wipes on their food.

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    1. So many think that government can help you but the only way they can help you is by taking something away from someone else. Government Has nothing without first taking it from someone else.

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  17. The owners and manager strike me as being pretty reasonable and very professional.

    I don't think town employees, politicians, or board & committee members have anything to worry about.

    Besides it is probably a federal offense to purposely contaminate food before serving to the general public.

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    1. As for the racial slur business. Thanks for the clarification. I'll try to watch out in the future, but free speech reigns supreme. You've gotta have tougher skin. Free speech includes speech we don't like or think anyone should use. By the way, that's a great restaurant.

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  18. "So many think that government can help you but the only way they can help you is by taking something away from someone else. Government Has nothing without first taking it from someone else."

    Really? So when the fire department put your house fire out, who did they take something from? When they fill the potholes on your street, plow your road after a blizzard, and protect you by arresting someone for robbery or assault, who did they take something from?

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    1. They take tax dollars from everyone who works.

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    2. Who do you think pays the salary of firefighters and police? Their "customers?" No. You and I but first the money has to be taken by the government. Seems obvious.

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  19. "So when the fire department put your house fire out, who did they take something from?"

    Me.

    Think "opportunity cost." Ask yourself "what caused the fire"?

    Money I paid in taxes is money that I couldn't spend to prevent what caused the fire in the first place. Money I didn't have to upgrade my wiring, put an insert inside my chimney or maybe even install an entire new furnace.

    While there are two extremes, one being no taxes and no fire department whatsoever, and the other being so oppressive taxation that fires are routinely caused by simple things that people couldn't afford to fix, to some extent there is a balance and money paid in taxes isn't spent for other things.

    Take the big fire in Hadley a while back -- if that really was caused by drier lint, then had the laundrymat either spent more money cleaning the ducts and/or upgraded them to more fireproof ones, there wouldn't have been a need for the fire department as there wouldn't have been a fire...

    As an aside, the nice thing about converting to gas is that you don't need a chimney. You can literally use plastic water pipe (e.g. the Pomery Lane CoOp behind the Hess station), you can vent through the wall (e.g Southpoint Apts) -- for a variety of reasons, I am not sure either is a particularly good idea, but both meet code. I checked...

    (And yes, the gas company really did neglect to remove twelve -- "red tags" on twelve different furnaces after having repaired them. Silly me, when I see an "unsafe, do not use" tag with the utility's name on it, I'm inclined to take it seriously -- and yes, I will be a "petty bueaucrat" and insist that they send someone out to remove it, and I want to see that person either driving or wearing something with the gas company's name on it -- or show me ID with it on it.)

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  20. Let me see if I get this straight:

    They can't do work, which includes adding parking spaces, because they don't have enough parking spaces?

    Am I missing something here?

    They can't do work to reduce their impact on the neighborhood (install the fence) because they impact on the neighborhood in the first place?

    Again, am I missing something here?

    And if the food truck is registered in the Town of Amherst, paying excise taxes to Amherst because it is "garaged" at that address, Amherst accepting the money (and reporting to the Registry if it doesn't get it), then how can the Town of Amherst either say it doesn't know the truck is there or that it isn't allowed to be?

    Again, am I missing something here?

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  21. They have grown out of that site. They are adding employees, the truck and a place for more people to wait and when the ZBA wanted more parking they cry fowl and want to sue. Success isn't free

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  22. One other thing:

    Remember how I said that people needed to be careful in how they address concerns about the UM students lest the precedent comes back to bite them?

    Here you have the aggressive new Building Commissioner, hired to go after the college kids, going after a local town business.

    Here you have the letter-of-the-ordinance guy you hired to goo after student housing doing the same thing to a local resturaunt.

    And the consequence of you being willing to accept asinine bureaucratic parking regulations imposed upon absentee landlords has led to you being forced to accept equally asinine bureaucratic parking regulations here.

    Even though they have the number of parking spaces the official regulation requires, the bureaucrat doesn't think they have enough so they can't add any...

    Isn't some better than none?

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  23. Ha! ha! "cry fowl". It's cry foul, not fowl. Think baseball, not KFC.

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  24. Larry, do you know if mission cantina has suddenly been permitted to be open till 1 am with a dj whose music can be heard through closed windows a street away?

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  25. I think their Special Permit does allow for a 1:00 AM closing, but not sure about the music (which I believe does have to be mentioned in the Special Permit).

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  26. Thanks, Larry. Hoping it was a one-time thing... would it be the Zoning Board I could contact for info?

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  27. Building Commissioner Rob Morra.

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