Troy's Gas Station Moratorium Is Still Alive
Vol. IV, No. 46 - An attempt to repeal the curent moratorium is shot down by Council, keeping the current moratorium alive for at least another meeting.
At least procedurally, Tuesday night’s Troy City Council meeting was one of the more interesting sessions in recent memory. On the surface, a routine vote was scheduled to extend two zoning moratoriums — one on group residential/social service facilities, one on gas stations. Underneath, it was a fight about whether the city’s own planning process has moved too slowly to justify holding a private developer’s money hostage.
Councilmember Jeff Schilling introduced an amendment that would have kept the group residential facility moratorium in place while immediately rescinding the gas station moratorium. He found a lone ally in Councilmember Susan Westfall. The rest of council voted the amended ordinance down, and the original ordinance extending both moratoriums another 90 days (through November 27) was held over for a second reading. No action. It comes back before council on July 20.
The core argument against Schilling’s amendment was timing. The city’s Unified Development Code (UDC) — a full rewrite of land use regulations — is still moving through the Planning Commission, with a public comment session scheduled for July 22. Council members supporting the extension argued that lifting the moratorium now would let a gas station application slip in under old rules right before new ones take effect.
That argument has some logic to it. It also exposes a planning failure that’s worth naming directly.
When council last extended the moratorium this past spring, staff requested just 90 days — apparently expecting the UDC to be finished and adopted before it expired. It wasn’t and it won’t be.
The moratorium has now been extended once already, and the most optimistic estimate for getting the UDC on the books is October, with the city’s law director suggesting it’s more likely to slip into November given a mandatory 30-day public notice period and another 30-day period to In hindsight, staff should have asked for a 180-day window from the start. That miscalculation appears to be the reason this fight is happening at all — not because Schilling’s amendment was reckless, but because the moratorium has now outlived its original justification twice over.
Even accepting that the UDC isn’t ready, nothing stopped city staff from drafting interim regulations under the existing zoning code — a stopgap the Planning Commission and council could have adopted to avoid freezing development entirely while the bigger rewrite plays out. That option wasn’t seriously discussed Tuesday night, and it’s arguably the more responsible middle ground between “extend indefinitely” and “lift immediately.”
This isn’t an abstract land-use debate. Mandeep Singh’s Troy Station LLC has spent roughly three years and reportedly $600,000 pursuing a gas station at South County Road 25A and Dye Mill Road, and never filed the formal online zoning application — a fact his attorney says he was never told he needed to do, and one the administration disputes. Whether or not Singh should be grandfathered in is a separate question from whether the city’s moratorium process itself has been managed well. Tuesday’s vote conflated the two.
Nothing changes yet. Both moratoriums remain in effect. Council revisits the extension ordinance on July 20, and the Singh case — application or no application — is still unresolved.
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