Lakewood Conservation District Draft Ordinance Released, Public Meetings Set For February
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A long-awaited draft ordinance for the expanded Lakewood Conservation District was released Friday, moving the neighborhood a step closer to protecting its historic architecture.
Interested neighbors are invited to attend ordinance review meetings at 6 p.m. Feb. 6 and Feb. 13 at The Filter Building, 2810 White Rock Road.
Summer Loveland, who began circulating a petition in mid-2022 to expand the Lakewood Conservation District, told CandysDirt.com on Friday that she’s pleased with the draft ordinance, a reflection of the wishes of a majority of Lakewood neighbors.
“It is time to stop speculating,” Loveland said. “Now that the draft ordinance is available, we can all see that the city staff clearly took into account the comments that were made during the 15 neighborhood meetings, including concerns of those who were fearful it would be too restrictive. There is a lot of leeway and optionality provided in the standards, allowing homeowners flexibility in a remodel, expansion, or new construction. This ordinance meets the objectives of protecting the character of our neighborhood and preventing the destruction of architecturally significant homes unless they are in major disrepair.”
View the draft ordinance here. The link was updated Monday to reflect Exhibit B, which includes the inventory of homes with noted styles.
The expanded conservation district, which requires a recommendation would include the Monticello and Westlake neighborhoods.
Conservation District Would Have Protected Historic Hutsell Home on Lakewood Boulevard
The expansion effort gained momentum in early 2023 as Loveland delivered the required signatures of supportive neighbors to City Hall and more than a dozen neighborhood meetings were held to gather feedback on the ordinance.
But a group of Tokalon Drive residents organized over the summer to oppose the conservation district, saying it infringed on their property rights. Meanwhile, delays occurred as Dallas lost some key staff members and the remaining staffers were tied up in processing a petition for the South Winnetka Heights Conservation District.
Lakewood Conservation District supporters were disheartened in mid-November when a $2.5 million historic Clifford Hutsell-designed home at 7226 Lakewood Blvd. was demolished. If the conservation district had been approved sooner, the home would have been protected.
“Without the passage of this ordinance, we will continue to see the character of our neighborhood and value of our historic properties diminished,” Loveland said Friday. “It is so important for neighbors to attend the upcoming meetings to have a full understanding of the proposed standards.”
The home at 7226 Lakewood, lauded by preservationists as a superb example of Hutsell’s Hollywood-inspired Spanish Eclectic style, was kept intact for decades by the previous owners.
“This is the best-preserved Hutsell I’ve seen in 35 years,” historic home remodeler Carol Gantt told CandysDirt.com. “To reproduce that amount of ironwork alone at that level of artistic merit would cost over $100,000 today.”
Timeline For Lakewood Conservation District Ordinance Adoption
City staff will present the proposed draft Lakewood Conservation District expansion ordinance at the two February meetings and allow time for questions and answers, Loveland said in an email to neighbors.
“This is not a meeting for feedback on standards, as those 15 public neighborhood meetings were held from August 2022 through March 2023,” Loveland said. “Please plan to attend both meetings so you can receive the presentation directly from city staff, see the ordinance, and get the facts. Two meetings have been set to allow sufficient time to address the ordinance and questions.”
Conservation districts are a zoning tool that allows neighborhoods to establish exterior design criteria and other standards to preserve the character of an area. An ordinance is established for each conservation district that details the regulations homeowners must follow in any renovations or new construction and must ultimately be approved by the Dallas City Council.
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It would be good if someone were to dig into the process that was utilized for the Lakewood CD-2 “expansion” effort. One issue the Tokalon neighbors have had as do many others on other streets is that this isn’t an “expansion.” It’s no different from what a brand-new CD would do to neighbors but didn’t follow the new-CD rules. Labeling a new CD effort an “expansion” doesn’t magically transform the substance of it. Read the steps in Dallas Development Code 51A-4.505 for yourself for doing a new CD, an amendment, an expansion, etc. Compare the neighborhood meetings authorized in them. In any process that permits zoning to be changed by neighbors after petitioning, there have to be two sets of meetings – a set before petitioning and a set after petitioning. The pre-petition set of meetings were added in 2015 to ensure transparency and inclusion – let folks know what’s coming before anyone can start petitioning. And let the neighbors craft a part of the petition itself. We didn’t have those meetings. The city now says you can avoid letting neighbors know what’s coming or any discussion or dissent before petitioning just by labeling it an expansion because that section doesn’t include those pre-petition meetings in the steps. But they also say that the absence of the steps outlining the post-petition set of ordinance-crafting meetings is no reason that they can’t just add them in there. Silence is one instance is used by the city to avoid the meetings, but silence in another instance is authorization to add them in. They can pick and choose the meetings to conduct in an expansion that accomplishes exactly what a new CD does. It’s absurd and irreconcilable. Whatever your feelings about the goal of the effort, you can’t make up a process to do it. You have to follow the rules outlined. An expansion just “adds area to the existing CD.” It’s just a boundary expansion, it doesn’t re-write the regulations like a new CD – that’s why it doesn’t contain any meetings to do that.