P&Z: To hell with tomorrow, let’s only think about today

Julieta Montes wants to establish a day care center in the house pictured here where she can, among other things, teach Spanish to children between the ages of 2 and 5. The home and a smaller mother-in-law-type structure in back of the main house sits on a half-acre of property at 503 Burleson between West Schlemmer and North streets. To realize her dream, which she says will allow her to spend more time at home with her toddler daughter, she apparently needs to have her property rezoned from Single Family Residential to Neighborhood Commercial.

So, after two citizens spoke at the Public Hearing against the idea, Ms. Montes appeared before six of the seven members (Irene Melendez was a no-show) of the Kyle Panning and Zoning Commission Tuesday to plead her case. Her idea was met … generally … favorably by the commissioners. They actually liked it … up to a point, that point being that sometime in the future some dastardly person would swoop in and turn her day care center into this, or even worse, this.

"I am a school teacher and I want to spend more time with my daughter, so I would like to provide Spanish lessons for kids," Ms. Montes told the commissioners. "But I would like to offer a safe environment for them so I think the best thing to do is comply with commercial requirements so that the kids have all the doors, the extinguishers and all the things that they need to be safe. I do not think this will highly impact the traffic. I do not ever intend to put a restaurant there. I just would like to have a small business that will allow me to spend more time with my daughter."

"Are you suggesting you wouldn’t be able to teach classes in your home?" commission chair Michael Rubsam asked.

"No," Ms. Montes replied. "What I’m suggesting is that I do not intend to have such a thing as a restaurant or something like that. I just intend to teach Spanish classes to kids. But I think if I have all the requirements of a commercial property it will be safer for the kids that I have on my property. I’m not planning on tearing down the current building. I’m just trying to bring it up to code to make it safe for kids to be there. I do not believe the current building has a big capacity. Not many kids would be able to be there. But I’m planning on keeping the current building as much as possible."

Commissioner Mike Wilson asked her if she planned to remodel the house.

"Just whatever is necessary to make it safer, like more doors and wider entrances but not completely rebuilding it," she said.

Wilson then wondered whether she had asked the city if she could do teach her classes without having the property rezoned.

"I did,:": she said "but I was told it needed to be rezoned to Neighborhood Commercial."

Commissioner Dan Ryan wondered how many students she anticipated at any one time.

"I do not anticipate there would be many," Ms. Montes said. "The city has its own rules about that and also the state. They require about 30 square feet for each kid, but that’s only in places where there’s no furniture, no restrooms, no kitchen. So the space that is allotted for kids is really not that much. So I’m not anticipating it would be over probably 20 something. I’m intending to leave the house looking like a home as much as possible. I’m just trying to make the place safer for kids and I don’t think this would make a lot of traffic because people don’t have to come and go all the time. They drop their kids off and then they leave."

Commissioner Michele Christie, who I guess drowsed through that exchange, then asked Ms. Montes "Ballpark figure, off the top of your head, how many students do you think you’ll have coming to you and is this going to be just for Spanish classes where students would come, say, after school or do you plan on running a full school curriculum or are you just going to teach Spanish?"

"I would like to do similar to school hours, 8 to 3, something like that," Ms. Montes said. "It would be Spanish immersion only for kids."

"What age ranges would you have?" Ms. Christie asked.

"2 to 5," Ms. Montes answered.

Christie: "How many?"

Montes: "Like I said, that’s up to the city and the state but I estimate about 28. I don’t think I’ll have the capacity for even 30.":

Christie: "Is this your home?"

Montes: "Right now it’s my home, but I cannot live there and provide the service at the same time, And if I do there are many security issues with the building as it is right now."

Christie: "So you would convert it to a school?"

Montes: "Yes. But just doing the minimum things necessary to make it safer. And, like I said, I would really like to keep it home-looking."

Moments later Rubsam told the other commissioners "This is a rezoning so you can’t control what goes there in the future. So it’s not appropriate to just look at this as a possibility for a school. There is a possible long list of things that could go at this location."

"My problem is that it doesn’t conform to what we have right there," Ryan echoed.

Rubsam, of course, agreed: "It doesn’t seem to lend itself well to what’s in the area. I don’t really consider this to be a compelling argument for rezoning a residential neighborhood."

"It doesn’t meet the qualifications for commercial and looking at what could be there gives me pause," Ms. Christie said. "I don’t see Neighborhood Commercial on that corner."

But Wilson countered "I think the use she wants is Neighborhood Commercial. It is a child care center. She wants to have younger-than-school-age children at a day care for Spanish immersion. So I think what she wants to do matches the zoning she’s asking for. But my thought is I’m less concerned with what she currently wants to do but what could be done in the future if she starts the day care and is unable to sustain it and then sells the property. Then it could become who knows what. I love the idea of having a day care option. I just don’t think day care in that location is the most viable kind."

Around then, another citizen wanted to speak in favor of the project and instead of extending him the courtesy of reopening the public hearing as just about any deliberative body I’ve ever encountered would do in such a situation, Rubsam asked community development director Howard Koontz to take the fellow outside and find out what his issues were. Turns out, his issues were the same as mine, but I’ll get to those in a minute. Interestingly, a few minutes later the commissioner had absolutely no problem letting another person from the audience get up and make a comment. Your guess to this inconsistency is as good as mine.

"I am not in favor of a rezoning but I would like to see if she could get a special use permit," Ryan finally said,

"But this is a zoning issue," Rubsam countered.

"OK," Ryan said, "if it’s a zoning issue then we’re going to have to turn down the zoning."

"We spoke to the former director of planning and she told us a special use permit was not possible for this kind of situation," Ms. Montes told the commissioners. "She told me rezoning was the only option which is why we initiated this process."

With that, commissioner Timothy Kay moved to deny her request, Ryan seconded and the commissioners voted unanimously against Ms. Montes.

Earlier in the process, during the public hearing, Mark Jones, speaking against the rezoning request, told the commissioners the area in question "has always been residential. We don’t see any reason for it to change,. It’s been residential longer than I’ve been alive."

And that’s true, but here’s the problem with that argument and with the commissioners denial of Ms. Montes’s request. Burleson Road is about to undergo one big honking’ change. Not only is it going to be widened, it’s eventually going to connect with Marketplace there at the Kohl’s/Target/H-E-B shopping compound., Burleson is already a fairly well traveled road when compared to most of the streets in Kyle, but when this particular road bond project is complete, Burleson is going to go through a complete transformation. And as much as Jones, the P&Z commissioners and others may want to object, it is soon going to be lined with restaurants and convenience stores and perhaps even a bank, a fitness center and a barber/beauty center. And wouldn’t it be absolutely, positively wonderful if someone wanted to locate an art gallery along Burleson? Burleson is about to become a commercial corridor and all the commissioners are doing right now is sticking their collective fingers in the dike. It’s just a shame that Ms. Montes’ dream of doing something productive for the community while at the same time giving her the opportunity to spend more time with her daughter has to be sacrificed when there are these changes that are definitely on the horizon.