Plasma center granted parking request

The five members of the Board of Adjustments managed to find the time in their obviously hectic schedules to unanimously approve Wednesday evening a request for a parking variance for BioLife Plasma Services, putting the fate of the plasma donation center planned for Kyle’s medical complex in the hands of the Planning & Zoning Commission.

At least, I think the board granted a variance. The agenda said "Consider a request … for a variance," but for reasons that are probably not worth the time or the effort to explore at length, the board re-classified the request as one for "an exception," not "a variance."

Regardless of what it’s called, the result is the same: BioLife will be allowed to have a parking lot with 156 parking spaces, 55 more than the maximum allowed by current city ordinances. The ordinance allows the board to expand the number of parking spaces if strict adherence would impose "an unreasonable hardship upon the use of the lot."

BioLife presented enough evidence to the board to convince it that not granting the request "would require any additional donors to park offsite on the roadway" or in parking lots belonging to neighboring businesses, creating "a safety hazard for vehicles traveling in the area" not to mention those pedestrians who would have to negotiate getting to the center from an off-premise parking place.

The board was also swayed in BioLife’s favor by the statement from BioLife that while the city’s code restricts the amount of impervious surface on any such property to 85 percent, the plasma donation site will include only 72.2 percent impervious cover.

Current plans call for the BioLife Center to be constructed across the street for the new Goodwill Center on the south side of Kyle Parkway across from Seton Medical Center. The Planning & Zoning Commission is scheduled to consider the center’s application for a conditional use permit in the I-35 overlay district at its meeting next Monday (moved up a day because of the election).

This entire procedure has been delayed by a month because the Board of Adjustments failed to achieve a quorum of its members when this subject first appeared on its agenda on Oct. 3.