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Margate mini-golf course foes ready to tee off
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MARGATE - People fighting a proposed miniature-golf course on Ventnor Avenue plan to take up their fight again tonight - with the Planning Board that approved the Pirate Island Golf Course last month.
Members of the group called "Sink Their Ship" say they will challenge the plans for the pirate-ship-themed mini-golf course at the board's 7 p.m. meeting, in part by challenging the credentials of a Planning Board official, Roger Rubin. They hope to get board members to overturn their vote from the September meeting based on new information about Rubin.
Rubin has held the title of land-use administrator in Margate and is also the city's zoning officer. But he acknowledges that he let his state license as a professional planner lapse in 2002 - and a planner's license is required in the Margate law that created the land-use-administrator job.
Doug Donato, a golf-course opponent, said Wednesday that Rubin's lack of a planning license "should severely impact the recommendations he made to the Planning Board." Donato maintains that without a license, Rubin has no more credibility than a private citizen speaking to the board.
And because Rubin's license expired seven years ago, Donato says, anyone who has been dissatisfied with board decisions over that time could go to court now to challenge the actions.
"You could have an enormous number of people requesting damages," Donato said.
Rubin called the lapsed license an oversight. He moved in 2001, shortly before the license was due, he said Wednesday, and the state Board of Professional Planners did not forward the renewal form to his new address. Without any reminders, he forgot to send the fee to keep the license up, Rubin said.
But he and Mary Siracusa, the city solicitor, also maintain that under state law, the city does not need a licensed planner or a land-use administrator. The state does require a zoning officer, Siracusa says, and Rubin has both that title and the credentials for the job.
"To be a zoning officer, you don't need a planner's license," the city's lawyer said. Siracusa added that based on her conversations with experts in land-use law, the missing license could be "an issue, but not something that's enough to overturn what the Planning Board did."
Arthur Russo is executive director of the state's Board of Professional Planners, and also of the board that licenses both professional engineers and land surveyors and another that oversees home inspectors. He agreed with Margate's contention that the town doesn't need a licensed planner or land-use administrator on its staff.
"In my experience, I've seldom encountered professional planners at the municipal level acting as land-use administrators," Russo said.
But the state official said it was Rubin's responsibility to change his address with the agency if he wanted to keep his license up.
"If he never got it, we never got the change of address," Russo said. He added that because the license is lapsed for more than five years, Rubin would need to retake the state examination to get it back - a policy of all state licensing boards.
Rubin said he hopes instead to give up the land-use administrator title and keep working strictly as the zoning officer - the civil-service title under which he gets all his salary, he says. He was appointed zoning officer around the same time the planner's license lapsed, he said.
Rubin maintained that the only reason he ever legally needed the professional-planner's license was that he used to be in charge of writing Margate's master plan and occasional changes to it - a job the city has since hired an outside consultant to do.
Donato, one of the opponents to the Pirate Island Golf Course, agreed that the city does not need a licensed planner under state law - but said the town does by its own ordinance.
"There are a lot of things you don't have to have," he said. "But once you make a law, you have to have it."
He added that the Sink Their Ship group is looking for lawyers to help fight Pirate Island, which the Planning Board approved to replace a former Sun Bank branch on Ventnor Avenue between Franklin and Frontenac avenues, in a commercial district. The bank has been closed since March 2008.
Most of those battling the golf course are neighbors who object to a variance the city gave the developers that allows them to not provide any parking - in an area the neighbors say is starved for parking in the summer. The opponents also argue that the two-level golf setup will create too much noise and draw too much traffic, including crowds of kids hanging out and making trouble in their neighborhood.
Contact Martin DeAngelis:
609-272-7237
Posted in Atlantic on Thursday, October 29, 2009 3:05 am
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