It’s been a tough year for Savannah’s Historic District Board of Review.
The 12-member all-volunteer board has had to vet an influx of large-scale construction and new infills, including at least three new hotels, making it one of the most active years since the recession put a big dent in commercial development.
Plus, many developers have gotten savvier in their presentations before the board, recruiting influential architects, playing fast and loose with the preservation ordinance and using higher ranking boards to overturn or get a laundry-list of variances for their projects.
Two long-time members, Jerry Lominack and Reed Engle, also resigned.
An average agenda this year included about nine items per meeting, according to Ellen Harris of the Metropolitan Planning Commission. Many of those meetings, on the second Wednesday of each month, lasted for six to seven hours — at least.
On Friday, seven of the 11 current members attended the board’s annual retreat at the historic Tybee Island Lighthouse, recapping the past year, assessing upcoming challenges and discussing ways to improve their governance and efficiency.
“If you tally up the average length of meeting … and we meet 12 times a year … that essentially adds up to two full weeks we’re each donating a year to work on the board,” said member Robin Williams.
To that end, the board, with its increasingly bloated agenda, discussed ways to cut down on the length of the meetings.
Among the suggestions were to hold them more frequently, move more projects onto the consent agenda for staff review, put more stringent time limits on public comment and petitioners and avoid interruptions and repetitive questions.
Board member Justin Gunther suggested the Historic Savannah Foundation, whose representatives speak during public comment on most items, could be given a seat on the board.
New member Debra Caldwell said some petitioners are figuring out that their projects may be more quickly vetted if they end up near the bottom of the agenda.
“I have noticed that it is really to their advantage to come in really late because we’re all tired, and you just get inundated with it,” she said. “I’ve actually seen a couple of times where we should’ve voted differently because we were so exhausted.”
As part of its strategic planning session earlier in the day, the board also tackled items such as how to better educate the public on its methodology and decision making, as well as auditing weaknesses or conflicts that occur in the ordinance.
Of the more controversial topics, the board touched on the height map and recent examples of developers trying to bypass the historic board by going through the Zoning Board of Appeals.
Although the public rarely sees a building from its initial design to completion, there is little doubt they benefit from the thorough and comprehensive vetting the board does to make projects fit within the larger historic district.
Leah Michalak, a preservation planner at the MPC, compiled a PowerPoint of some of the top projects that had been completed or started in 2014 with the approval of the historic board.
“I was seeing a theme this year, and that’s things that have been vacant or abandoned for a very long time are coming back,” she said.
The former Club Asia at 148 Price St. is being rehabilitated into a single-family home, 574 Indian St. became the new Service Brewing Co. and the McDonough Row townhomes were completed and pre-sold.
Other trickier projects such as the Family Dollar at 702 W. Oglethorpe Ave. showed significant improvement from its original design — from single-story and setback from the road — even as the MPC continues to push them on other issues like their oddly tinted retail windows.
“You’ve had a really hard year, but you guys have done some good stuff,” said Michalak.
ON THE WEB
For more information on the Historic District Board of Review, go to thempc.org.