The Nashville Town Council is supporting an update to its ordinances that would give greater protection to all buildings in town that are 50 years old or older.
The new amendment to the “demolition permitting process” passed the council 5-0 on Sept. 19.
The amendment now advances to the Brown County Area Plan Commission for a public hearing, then it will go back to the town council for final approval — likely at a special meeting yet this month.
Time is of the essence because of the upcoming sale of the Andy Rogers estate. On Oct. 30, at least eight buildings in town limits will be auctioned. That’s not counting separately all the buildings in Antique Alley, which are included as one group on the sale list.
If this ordinance amendment passes through all the channels it needs to this month, all of Rogers’ buildings in town will be protected from demolition, said town council President Jane Gore — at least, for longer than they would have been under the town’s current ordinance. Without an amendment, only two of them would have definitely been covered.
The current ordinance, in effect since 2006:
- only counts a building as “historic” if it was built after Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, or if the owner of a newer building asks for it to be deemed historic;
- requires a review of demolition permits for historic buildings by the Nashville Development Review Commission (DRC) for up to 45 days;
- requires the DRC to grant that demolition when the 45-day period is up if it doesn’t do it sooner; and
- allows for a fine of up to $2,500 per day when these procedures are violated.
The new ordinance:
- covers buildings that are 50 years old or older, meaning new ones will “age in” to be covered each year;
- changes the reviewing body for demolition permits to the Nashville Town Council instead of the DRC;
- extends the maximum review period to 180 days from 45;
- sets a process by which a public hearing can be done to “weigh the significance, location and condition of the building, as well as the economic value of the building to its owner or owners and to the community, and to consider alternatives to demolition that would allow the building to be preserved”;
- still requires the town to grant that demolition period by the time the 180 days are up if no other alternative arrangements have been made to preserve it;
- keeps the $2,500-per-day maximum fine, and adds a clause that if a violation has occurred, no “improvement location permit” to build something else can be granted for that land.
The amendment covers buildings that are on commercial-zoned as well as residential-zoned properties, said Town Attorney James T. Roberts.
The town’s current demolition ordinance also covers residential and commercial properties, but that wasn’t necessarily the case with an entirely different historic preservation ordinance which the town had been discussing and rewriting for the past year or so. One of the points under debate about the historic preservation ordinance was whether or not historic protections should be put on residential structures, as some owners feared that they would come with costs they couldn’t shoulder.
Neither board has passed the historic preservation ordinance, since neither the town council nor the DRC could come to agreement on what it should cover, and how it would be decided whether a building is worthy of protection.
In the meantime, this new amendment to the current demolition ordinance gives more structures in town some added protection at a time where several landmark buildings could pass into new hands.
David Martin, a member of the DRC and an advocate for historic buildings, had been pushing the council for more than a year to pass something before Rogers’ properties were sold. “Do you like it?” town council member Nancy Crocker asked Martin about the demolition ordinance amendment.
“I think so,” he said. “I’m not real enthusiastic. I think there are things we could strengthen. But I think it’s a very important thing to have now, right now.”
Vivian Wolff, another local historic preservation advocate, asked if the council could block a demolition. “You can say no, but you can only delay it up to 180 days,” Roberts told her, explaining that property owners have constitutional rights that local governments can’t control.
The expanded waiting period for a demolition permit gives another group more time to “explore possibilities to save or preserve the building,” he added.
Local group Peaceful Valley Heritage did that last year, when the blue Dennis Calvin House on East Main Street was scheduled for demolition. Peaceful Valley stepped in at the 11th hour to stop the demo and instead get a neighboring landowner to take the building off the land, and to find a source of partial funding to restore the home. The move happened, but the home hasn’t been restored yet; it was taken apart, but there are plans to rebuild it with a mix of old and new materials.
“It’s as tough as we can get,” Gore said about the demolition ordinance amendment. “We’re still looking at a preservation ordinance … (but) we need something in place now.”
