Pelly, along with Vice President Barber Melton and several group members, held a press conference March 27 – a few hours before the Board of Adjustment rejected appeals filed separately by Kimberly Hodges, Mike Lewis and Heather Rayburn without examining the evidence (see "Overseeing the Overseers," Feb. 15 Xpress). The three had each paid a $500 filing fee.

The city, they maintain, has failed to follow its own explicit rules. City staff, they say, approved UDO violations in connection with three recent projects: Staples, the Prudential Lifestyle Realty building and Walgreens. According to the UDO, these noncompliant plans should have been submitted to the Board of Adjustment, which is authorized to grant a variance after holding a public hearing.

Both the Prudential and Staples signs exceed the maximum dimensions stipulated by the UDO, and the Staples sidewalk fails to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, said Rayburn. She also used a measuring tape to support her contention that the Staples building violates a state law requiring "visibility triangles" at intersections, because it obstructs the view of drivers entering Merrimon Avenue from Orange Street.

City staff, she charged, have bent over backward in interpreting the rules. "They used the square footage of the letters on the Staples sign to calculate the size, instead of the entire red background," she said, gesturing toward a copy of the sign permit. "The city says that the rest of the red background is an 'architectural feature,' but anyone can see that the larger red background is the same logo Staples uses on all of its advertising."

Hodges, meanwhile, showed Xpress the Prudential permit, which notes that sign's size as 64 square feet; the UDO caps such signs at 50 square feet. "As a business owner, I ... have been required to abide by the sign ordinances," she said. "It is not fair for the small businesses to have to adhere to the UDO while the chains are given more leeway."

Assistant City Attorney Curt Euler urged the Board of Adjustment to dismiss all three cases without hearing the facts, asserting that Hodges, Lewis and Rayburn don't qualify as "aggrieved parties" under the law. Citing Buncombe County's recent revaluation, Euler argued that since property values have increased, the plaintiffs couldn't possibly have suffered financial loss. He also maintained that the appeals had not been filed within the prescribed time limit and that the Walgreens matter was now moot, since the developers' original zoning permit had been terminated after the developer violated the remodeling permit. (Walgreens has since been issued a new building permit containing the same alleged violations as the original.)

Attorney Greg Beckwith argued that his clients have every reason to believe they could suffer financial damage in the future due to the city's failure to enforce the UDO. Case law, said Beckwith, supports consideration of the facts as evidence that parties are aggrieved and therefore eligible to file an appeal.

But the Board of Adjustment refused to consider Beckwith's arguments, and in the end, all three appeals were rejected 5-0.

– Cecil Bothwell