Clay Taylor, the owner of Brookside Garden Apartments, spoke against a new Kum & Go gas station on South 8th and West Brookside streets at the Aug. 9 meeting.
Colorado Springs City Council has voted 6-3 to allow Kum & Go to build a 24-hour gas station on South 8th and West Brookside streets, reversing a June decision by the Planning Commission to stop the development.
The decision came during a three-and-a-half hour Council hearing late on Aug. 9. More than 20 people made public comments during the Council meeting against the Kum & Go — and by the time the meeting started, more than 900 had signed an online petition to stop its construction. The Ivywild Improvement Society and Skyway Association, neighborhood organizations that represent hundreds of homeowners in the surrounding areas, have been campaigning against the Kum & Go for months.
The project has been the subject of back-and-forth appeals by Kum & Go representatives and Ivywild residents and the owner of a low income apartment complex directly east of the site, who were adamantly opposed to it. Opponents argued that the new use of the site — a gas station and convenience store — would be a significant and disruptive change from the consignment store that used to operate at that street corner.
But the 1.04-acre, five-parcel site is already designated as a C-5 zone district for intermediate businesses, and gas stations and convenience stores are a permitted use of C-5, a majority of councilors concluded during an Aug. 9 regular meeting. Their decision upheld city planning department staff’s initial approval of Kum & Go’s plan in May.
Councilors Stephannie Fortune, Nancy Henjum and Bill Murray voted against the Kum & Go plan.
The Aug. 9 hearing, prompted by Kum & Go’s appeal of the Planning Commission’s original 4-1 vote against the new gas station, centered largely around a subjective section of city zoning code criteria that requires a development’s use and design, among other things, to be “compatible and harmonious with the surrounding neighborhood.”
Ivywild neighbors said a new gas station would not meet that criteria, and those who live directly next to the site argued that the all-hours light, noise and traffic created by a Kum & Go — or any other 24-hour gas station — would harm their health and wellbeing.
Among public commenters at the meeting, three residents of Brookside Garden Apartments, a 10-unit complex for low income and mostly elderly residents located next to the Kum & Go site, said they believe it will make them more vulnerable to crime and obstruct their privacy. Clay Taylor, who with his wife has owned the complex for 12 years, said Kum & Go’s property line is just 5 feet away from some of the residents’ bedroom and bathroom windows.
Taylor told the Business Journal he did not expect Council to vote against the interest of Ivywild residents. A vote against the Kum & Go, he argued during the meeting, would have been “a vote in favor of quality affordable housing” — six of his tenants are on fixed incomes and six have disabilities, and now they are concerned they have no option but to live a few feet away from the gas station or move out of Colorado Springs, due to the city’s lack of affordable housing.
“We’re giving back to our community by providing a safe place to live and keeping our rents affordable,” Taylor said. “Nine out of the 10 tenants expressed a strong concern over increases in traffic, litter, crime, noise and compromised personal safety if Kum & Go was built next door. This group is physically and financially vulnerable."
The Planning Commission — the administrative body that first reviews development appeals — on June 16 voted in favor of the neighbors and Taylor, shooting down the Kum & Go plan and citing the “compatible and harmonious” criteria in section 7.5.502 (E) of the city’s zoning code in their explanation for voting against it. The decision was about “what we think is right, what we think is harmonious, what we think doesn’t follow the criteria,” Commission Chair Scott Hente said ahead of the June 16 vote.
But City Council ultimately disagreed. Councilor-at-large Wayne Williams said “I don’t see any legal basis for denying this,” arguing that the Kum & Go development fits squarely into its existing C-5 zoning district.
Councilor Dave Donelson, who represents District 1, defended the planning department’s original decision to approve the Kum & Go against some neighbors’ claims that staff does not take into consideration the “compatible and harmonious” criteria.
“The staff found that the details of the use, the site layout, setbacks, buffering and landscaping were compatible and harmonious with the neighborhood, given its location at the corner of a principal arterial, a major road and a major collector street and the fact that there are other gas stations, convenience stores on this same corridor,” Donelson said, reading in part from a packet presented by planning staff to councilors ahead of the meeting.
“It was suggested that our staff doesn’t look at compatibility,” he added. “They do, and they found it to be compatible, and I agree.”
Mary Kasal, a principal for Entitlement and Engineering Solutions representating Kum & Go in the appeal, commented on the subjectivity of the zoning section during a rebuttal to neighbors’ public comments.
“Are we harmonious and compatible? That is ambiguous — to one group it means one thing, to another, it means something different,” Kasal said. “Everybody uses gas, but everybody wants gas in somebody else’s neighborhood.”