"The problem people are having with this is that the city has allowed Janie more room for future expansion than her concept calls for," says Ed Lewis. The zoning documents show that Ellis proposes to add only 15,700 square feet of building space to the combined total of 28,000 square feet already occupying her and Kueffner's property. However, the new zoning permits a total of 85,000 square feet of buildings on the land--about 20 percent of the total acreage.
That 43,000-square-foot difference, says Lewis, "has left plenty of room for people's imaginations to run." That they've run to the Borgata underscores the difficulty of comparing the Ellis property to other places. Its problem is its individuality. There isn't any place like it. And that goes for the zoning, too.
"In fact, if you went looking for a zoning category to fit all the uses there now," says Lisa Collins, who directs the city staff who coordinates rezoning applications, "you'd have a hard time putting it someplace."
According to planners inside and outside the city of Scottsdale, the SC category was introduced several years ago to allow for more flexible kinds of developments, with campus-style mixtures of activities, including retail.
In Ellis' case, the allowed activities range beyond the grandfathered uses to include up to 30,000 square feet of retail, a small restaurant (2,000 square feet) and a cafe (1,500 square feet) which Zraket sees leading to the need for a liquor license.
Ellis says she has no interest in serving alcohol.
Zraket says that he once offered to drop his opposition to Ellis' and Kueffner's application if they withdrew it and applied for Service Residential (SR) property, a category for offices with limited foot and car traffic.
However, neighbors point out that he has vehemently opposed every other SR proposal in the neighborhood. And, according to community planner Don Hatter, that classification wouldn't accommodate the kind of uses that have historically been there or that could reasonably be added, for example, the small but steady level of retail sales that have occurred there for years. And the studios don't fit the ordinance's definition of offices.
The difficulty of finding the right zoning fit for properties like Ellis' and Kueffner's is hardly confined to Scottsdale. Throughout the Valley and the suburban West, rigid zoning categories, which have segregated work from home, have left too few models for small, vital mixed-use developments in residential neighborhoods.
"It's almost as though they are waiting to be invented," says Ignacio San Martin, an associate professor of planning and landscape architecture at Arizona State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design. Experts agree that such inventions don't come easily. They're too often stymied by community codes, rules and expectations for neat zoning packages that don't suit the changing ways people want to live and work.
George Zraket knows the situation well. A number of years ago, he unsuccessfully petitioned the 12 other homeowners in his subdivision to rescind the property's deed restrictions. Written in 1958, he says, "they no longer matched the kinds of things we want to do with our property." He says they prevent him and other neighbors from adding more houses onto their 1.25 acres. They also prohibit residents from having an office or running a business, as Zraket does, out of the house. But in 1958, who could imagine an office on a desktop? And who could imagine the need for a closer link between work and home? The irony, say friends of Ellis and Kueffner, is that link has been growing on Ellis' and Kueffner's property for 60 years. Some of the fear it has aroused stems from genuine concerns about how an untested zoning category will work in an established neighborhood.
But many people living along Cattle Track say those fears have been fanned by George Zraket. "He has become a political animal over this," says a neighbor. "And my guess is he'll use this as a springboard to run for office."
Zraket says he wants to run for one of the three Scottsdale city council seats open in 1998, and that joining a slate of anti-growth and -rezoning candidates isn't out of the question. He'll make a decision in July. In the meantime, he has work to do.
Once the referendum is decided, he says, "We're going after them on those grandfathered uses. We're going to get that whole mess cleaned out over there."
"My guess," says Michael Ellis, "is he won't be happy until he runs my 87-year-old mother off the land.
