A homeowner who built a 13-foot-by-13-foot brick pavilion without permits must now demolish it, the city of Atlanta’s Board of Appeals ruled, after considering a neighbor’s complaint that the structure blocked a view of the club’s golf course.
A homeowner must demolish a brick pavilion built without permits, the city of Atlanta has ordered, after hearing about through a neighbor’s complaint that the structure blocked a view of Dunwoody County Club, the Reporter Newspapers of Sandy Spring, Ga., reported.
Joanne Black, the homeowner, had the 13-by-13-foot backyard pavilion built nearly a year ago without a required permit and zoning variance, the Reporter Newspapers reported. In a 4-2 vote on April 13, the city’s Board of Appeals declined to legalize it. Black’s attorneys say a legal appeal is possible, but could cost as much as the pavilion itself: $20,000 to $25,000.
“Allowing this structure to remain won’t cause any harm,” Hadeel Masseoud, one of Black’s attorney’s, argued to the Board. “Tearing it down would be a great endeavor causing a lot of waste.”
Board member Colin Lichtenstein was not convinced there was a hardship in losing a structure whose main physical function was to provide shade, the Reporter Newspapers reported. “Wouldn’t an umbrella serve the same purpose?” he asked.
Black’s approximately two-acre property, which borders Dunwoody CC’s golf course, includes a house, a swimming pool and a clubhouse, the Reporter Newspapers reported. The brick pavilion was part of an improvement project that included a patio, a fire pit and a horseshoe pit.
The city learned of the structure in March from neighbors’ complaints of unpermitted construction and issued a stop-work order. One e-mailed complaint said the pavilion was built without notice to the community’s homeowners association, and, along with tree plantings and other work, “obstructed our view of the golf course,” the Reporter Newspapers reported.
The neighbor later withdrew the objection, but the city’s planning staff remained unconvinced. The pavilion violated zoning by standing 15 feet from the property line in an area with a 50-foot limit, due to the requirements of setback rules and a stream buffer, the Reporter Newspapers reported.
Black did not speak at the hearing. Diana Parks Curran, another attorney for Black, said her client “inadvertently” built the pavilion without a permit or zoning variance due to confusion about the property’s “agricultural” zoning designation—an outdated category the city is eliminating in a zoning code rewrite, the Reporter Newspapers reported.
Curran and Masseoud noted that the property’s irregular shape results in construction being barred on an unusually high percentage of its lawn. Requirements for a back-up septic system field leave much of the site unbuildable, the attorneys said, and the area where the pavilion stands comes to a sharp point with overlapping setbacks.
Board chair Ted Sandler, one of the two votes to allow the pavilion to remain, was sympathetic to the situation. “This is something that I can’t say I’ve ever seen before,” he said of the large limits on land use caused by the septic requirements, the Reporter Newspapers reported.
But most other Board members agreed with planning staff that the limits didn’t meet the definition of a hardship, the Reporter Newspapers reported. With the pool, clubhouse and patio still remaining, the “applicant has reasonable use of the area for entertainment purposes without the pavilion,” a staff memo said.
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