On September 22, 2025, the Syracuse Economic Development Committee met to review proposed amendments to the City of Syracuse Zoning Ordinance (formerly ReZone). The meeting was chaired by an unnamed committee chair, with Councilors Nave, Jones Rouser, Hudson, Majuk, Paniagua, Mattel, and Williams in attendance. Deputy Commissioner of Code Enforcement and Zoning Administration Jake Dishaw presented a summary of changes, supported by Commissioner of Neighborhood and Business Development Michael Collins and Corporation Counsel Martha Hertzberg. The discussion covered a wide range of technical clarifications, use definitions, and policy adjustments, but no formal votes were taken; the committee agreed to gather further questions and continue the discussion.
The uh uh economic development committee, and I'm joined here by uh Counselor Nave, Council Jones Rouser, President Hudson, uh my good friend Councilor Majuk, Councilman Paniagua, Councilman Mattel, and Councillor Williams, a good turnout for this committee meeting, right? President, what do you think? Absolutely. I know. And uh here, of course, with uh uh Mr. Dishau, who's uh in charge of our zoning office and a myriad of other things. So Jake, why don't you just go over uh I know it's like you gave us and uh gave us a lot of information here. Uh I did go through the uh re-zone and uh highlighted sections, but maybe this a general overview that you strike to us would help out. Sure. That sounds good. Jake Dishhaw, deputy commissioner of code enforcement and zoning administration. So as a zoning administrator, um, we will go through a summary of the changes up on the screen is the full version. So if there's anything that we want to look at more closely for the full version, we can pull it up on the screen. Um, but I'll hit the highlights and we can go through anything from there. Um starting with just overall changes to the entire uh document, uh corrected some scriptner errors or grammatical errors and omissions uh from the original document. Uh we're changing references uh about zone districts from uh zoning district to zone district itself. Um changing references from use to use type as appropriate, corrected internal and external cross references um in the text and and the tables within, and uh uh removed all references to the administrative manual, um, which we don't have. Um it was never completed, so we've stopped making reference to that for the time being. Um that jumps to article one, uh officially changing the name from rezone uh to the City of Syracuse zoning ordinance, an official map to uh the City of Syracuse zoning ordinance. So rezone was the process in getting to a new code, so we're officially gonna stop calling it that, officially make the document known as the Syracuse zoning ordinance. Um clarified that compliance with all applicable codes and laws is required for any development. I'll give you a brief reason why. So somebody wants to come in for a special use permit in a mixed use building, but they don't have a certificate of use for the bar on the first floor of the store, or the building doesn't have their three-year state mandated certificate of compliance. The code clarifies now that like you need to follow all state, federal, local laws to them be in compliance or to establish something within the code. It just helps us get overall compliance and and not give somebody something when they owe us something, if that makes sense. Um article two, um clarifying some language within zone districts, base zone districts. Again, some of this is really technical stuff. Um but the process to get through this is actual use case scenarios. Like we've put the code to use in an actual situation that we've dealt with over the last you know year and said this needs to be updated or changed or clarified or slightly edited. So a lot of this is some of its technical, like legal changes to actual text um rather than a large-scale subsubstance. So not to bore you to death, but uh some of that stuff is definitely needed as well along the way. Uh we've revised our dimensional standards and setbacks for principal and accessory structures, clarified and revised the lot size minimums uh and roof heights in certain zone districts, clarified and revised minimum stories required and maximum lot coverage. So again, I'll just give you a real life example. Um Lafayette Hills wants to develop housing. That's not news to anybody, but they want to do clusters of townhouses, and they want it so cluster of four in the center units, they wanted smaller units so they could have different price ranges. So people that want a smaller unit can pay less. People that want an end cap unit with three or four bedrooms can pay more. The problem is is some of our dimensional standards didn't allow for that. It had to be a uh minimum of 25 feet wide. So we we're proposing to change that down to 20 to meet you know that need. Um, so that's just one example or one actual use case. Yeah, you got a situation like that. I mean, there I can see there would be a variety of situations that might pop up like that, but we have to change the code, or couldn't you do administrative adjustment for something like that? There are some things that do allow administrative adjustment from from myself. Um, other things actually need the the text amendments, and that that's one of them because it's in the table that says, you know, or you could go for variance, but we we don't want to send people to variances for something that we think is a standard kind of nationally. We'll we looked at and said other places are allowing townhouses, which you know they share a common wall, which is the property line, to be smaller than 25 feet, some even less than 20. Yeah, I I why don't you get through what we again there are many sort of like where we do issue a lot of administrative approvals and we do have administrative adjustments, which is if you look at our board of zoning appeal schedule, it's a very small uh number of meetings and items on those meetings. Many times we've canceled the BZA meeting because we don't have any items for them to hear. So that itself, if you look at that over the last two years, I mean, I don't know how many we've had total, but in let's say 26 months of rezone. Um, I don't know that we've had 15 items on BZA.