The Wellington Village Council agreed Tuesday to send a response to the many e-mails that the village has received regarding Equestrian Sport Productions’ application for “floating zoning districts” that would allow hotels in equestrian areas.
The response is to assure the senders that they will be kept informed of any action or planned action on the applications.
At present, the applications have been held up due to traffic issues with Palm Beach County that must be resolved first. After reviewing the application with the Equestrian Preserve Committee, the applicant postponed review by the Planning, Zoning & Adjustment Board after the traffic issues were discovered, leading to frustration among residents who were prepared to speak at that meeting.
There also has been confusion among some that the application was initiated by the village, which it was not.
Wellington Village Manager Paul Schofield said that the council had discussed preparing a response to the e-mails regarding the application, and that he had prepared a draft response for their approval.
“There are a couple of things that I think we, as a community, need to make very clear,” Schofield said. “The applications that are in here are not something that the council presented. It’s not something that the council has any choice about considering. Every resident, every landowner, has the right to petition their government. That’s what they have done in this case.”
He said one of the e-mails asked, “Why does the council support this application?”
“To the best of my knowledge, nobody on this council has expressed an opinion one way or the other, and you’re precluded from doing that,” Schofield said. “You have to consider the evidence presented at public hearings.”
Schofield said the next most prevalent question is why the village is even processing the applications, since village voters passed a referendum last year that prohibited hotels in the Equestrian Preserve Area.
“Anybody can ask you to consider anything,” he said. “The property owner has made a request. Part of the request is to take the property out of the equestrian preserve, and in that same set of charter amendments, the authority was provided to remove properties from the equestrian preserve by a supermajority vote of four votes on the council.”
Schofield said nobody on the council has indicated to him how they are going to vote, but the village has an obligation to process any application that comes in and send it through the hearing process.
Mayor Anne Gerwig pointed out that land use referendums are prohibited by state law, and the village charter provisions are the backbone of its government, which does not allow hotels or condos in the Equestrian Preserve Area, and also requires four votes of the council to remove property from the Equestrian Preserve Area.
“Those items, no condos in the equestrian preserve, no apartments in the equestrian preserve, already existed in our land development code, and the four votes of the council for a comp plan amendment also existed,” Gerwig said. “It’s kind of confusing, because there are a lot of moving parts here, but none of this is coming from us.”
Schofield said the information that is available on the village web site is in two parts.
“We have the information that is submitted by the applicant, and there are nine applications, four of which are in the process now, and we have some information that was submitted by people who are opposing it,” he said. “There’s really only one piece of information that the village has prepared, and that is the staff report that compares what is actually in the application to what is actually in the code.”
Schofield said he would like to get a letter out to anybody who has submitted an e-mail and assure them that as the applications go through the process, the village will notify them.
“We take their comments seriously, and the planning department is going to deal with frequently asked questions on where this application is,” he said. “All applications are shown on the web site, so people can get those, but with the number of e-mails coming, I would like to get something that actually tells what the village’s real position is, because there’s too much misinformation.”
Councilman Michael Drahos said that given the number of e-mails coming in, the village should have responded sooner.
“I would like to have had this response prepared weeks ago to prevent some of the concerns… that this has already been predetermined, or that because the council has been silent on this issue, that is in some way indicative of how we feel about the issue,” Drahos said. “It would be very irresponsible to comment at all publicly about this application before actually seeing it and hearing the evidence and the testimony of witnesses.”
He said it’s unfortunate that mailers have gone out that suggested to residents that the council has already made up its mind.
“Today, I think, is one proper step to hopefully educating the residents on how this process works, and we are following the process,” Drahos said.
Councilman Michael Napoleone stressed that the applications are not council-driven, but the council is duty-bound to follow the process. “Just because somebody applies for something doesn’t mean that they are going to get what they applied for,” Napoleone said. “We are duty-bound to wait for the quasi-judicial hearing. At that point, we would vote up or down for these applications. Until then, we can’t consider it. If we make up our minds ahead of time, we are prejudicing ourselves.”
Vice Mayor John McGovern said the village web site should also be updated and the information pertaining to the applications made more visible.
McGovern said with the traffic study still to come, the applications will have to go all the way back to the beginning, starting with the Development Review Committee.
Village Attorney Laurie Cohen said the applicant hopes to have its traffic issues resolved sometime in June, but until they actually have it, the DRC meeting cannot be scheduled.
McGovern said it was unfortunate that a hearing was scheduled for the Planning, Zoning & Adjustment Board and the applicant had to postpone because the traffic issues were not resolved, which caused consternation among the several dozen residents present to make comment on the application.
Schofield said that anyone who sent an e-mail to the village will get responses as to when the meetings are scheduled. “When we schedule them, they will get an e-mail,” he said.
We voted for “No Development in the Equestrian Preserve”. How can the Council and Staff create and entertain a loophole for development by removing the equestrian show grounds from the Equestrian Preserve? Sounds like a high level of chicanery is being employed.
Also, why is Mayor Gerwig promoting this scheme at local real estate offices? Why are two Councilmen talking up these applications before it has been vetted? Why would these Council Members vote against the overwhelming majority of voters that voted “NO” to development?