Winfield Inn and surrounding property may get new zoning

 

According to its website, the mansion that currently bears the name Winfield Inn was built on its current 27-acre plot in 1884. No one lives there. It is being used as an outdoor wedding venue and, that same website claims, more than 100 weddings and other outdoor events take place there every year, at prices starting at $3,500 per event. And that does not include catering.

The website lists Leslie Moore as "the proprietor" of the Winfield Inn, but he is more than that. Moore, together with his partner Magdalena Rood are well known, if sometimes controversial, developers in the Austin area. Moore met some resistance in 2009 when he tried to rezone a one-half acre lot at 313 Red Bird Lane (for those familiar with Austin, that’s just north of Stassney Lane and east of South 1^st Street, not that far from the Texas School for the Deaf). Moore and Rood are also listed jointly, as are Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Diane Land, as one of the many Waller Creek Explorers, major donors to the Waller Creek Conservancy, a non-profit formed to create and maintain a series of urban parks around Austin’s Waller Creek. Together, Moore and Rood have formed a limited liability company, aptly named MooreRood Properties, LL.C, and it is that Austin-based limited liability company that owns the 27-acre property that’s home to the Winfield Inn as well as a connecting 4.19-acre plot bordering on Stagecoach Road.

And it’s these two pieces of property that Moore and Rood are seeking to have rezoned from agricultural to retail services. Their application for this rezoning is scheduled to be heard March 14 by the Planning Commission and March 21 by the City Council.

I have reached out to the Winfield Inn to see if I can learn more about the request (I've received the automatic "we'll contact you soon" reply), but one reason for it could simply be a wedding venue might very well be considered a non-conforming use and not that MooreRood has any plans to develop the land into a major retail area. The timing of the request, however, is interesting because, just two days ago, the council, on first reading, rezoned 86 acres just northeast of the MooreRood property for a new subdivision that will contain at least 275 new homes. And a major retail center serving that subdivision along with the new homes that will be going into the Blanco River Ranch development further west could be regarded as a valuable asset. Not only that, MooreRood's Facebook page describes the LLC as a "shopping/retail" company.

On the other hand, a major retail center would destroy the ambiance of the Winfield Inn — and let’ face it, its ambiance provides a major competitive advantage — so it’s rather improbable, if not impossible, to see the outdoor wedding venue co-existing with additional retail development. In other words, it’s likely to be one or the other, but not both.

The reason I’m leaning toward the non-conforming use side of the argument is because of the property’s recent annexation into the City of Kyle, and such annexations require these annexed properties to conform with pre-existing zoning ordinances unless the owners and the city have reached a development agreement that exempts the owners from these restrictions. Before it was annexed, the Winfield Inn did not need to be concerned with its zoning, but now it does and agricultural zoning in Kyle only allows "farming, ranching, pasturage, detached single-family residences and related accessory structures, on a minimum one acre tract." No mention of an outdoor wedding venue there.

And we might not get the answers to that at the Planning Commission or the City Council public hearings on the issue because there is absolutely nothing that requires MooreRood to discuss what, if any, changes it plans to make on the property. On the other hand, applicants usually reveal more than they are required to during this process.