Business Owners Ask For Leniency In Landscape Ordinance Enforcement

By Staff in Miscellaneous on Mar 14, 2010 6:00PM

The city's landscape ordinance is hitting some small businesses at a bad time financially, raising the question if their should be leniency in its enforcement. Joe Perrotta, co-owner of King Transmission, had to pay $50,000 to fix up his parking lot and install ornamental fencing around his Humboldt Park auto repair shop, Chicago News Cooperative reported. Small business owners are required to pay for fencing or can be fined $500-$1,000 for each day a violation exists. But where did it all start? With Mayor Daley's trip to Europe in the mid-90's.

The mandate for private investment in fencing follows a major and controversial move by the city. Mayor Richard M. Daley’s love of ornamental fencing, born during a trip to Europe in the mid-1990s, led City Hall and other Daley-controlled agencies to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to put up wrought-iron-style fences across Chicago. Then in 1999, the City Council approved a change in the city’s zoning and landscaping ordinances to require business owners to dig into their own pockets to surround their parking lots with the same ornamental fencing that the mayor had wrapped around schools, parks, public housing and city offices.

Despite calls from some aldermen to do so, city officials have not yet decided to support a moratorium on the enforcement by allowing small business owners to sign affidavits promising to do the required work within six months or a year. A small business study by the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School concluded Chicago is so burdensome with rules, regulations and enforcement that it impedes small business. Patricia Scudiero, the mayor’s zoning commissioner, told Chicago News Cooperative, the outcry is due to the economy: “There is not more enforcement. There is more complaining.”

Post by: Sean Stillmaker