ELYRIA — Mayor Bill Grace will ask City Council on Monday to place a moratorium on the design review process until a more streamlined system can be rolled out after the first of the year.

Businesses and contractors flooded City Hall in October to voice their concerns about the city process they call costly, subjective and unequally enforced. In response, Grace said the Community Development and Building departments have started the daunting task of revamping the entire process.

“The end result should be something similar to what we have now, but we are trying to put a more straightforward and streamlined process in place,” he said. “It will still serve as an important part of the building process.”

A City Council Community Development Committee meeting scheduled for Thursday to discuss the design review process has been canceled and will be rescheduled at a later time. Committee Chairman and Councilman Tom Callahan, D-at large, said he decided to postpone the meeting to give the administration time to work.

“But if progress is still being made, that is excellent,” Callahan said. “That was the whole point of bringing it to Council in the first place. I don’t look at this as a cancellation. It is just a postponement.”

The Design Review Committee, currently a team of citizen volunteers that meets twice a month to review new building plans to ensure designs are right for the city and cohesive to the surroundings, was developed by Grace because of what he deemed haphazard construction that created blight around the city.

The goal was to reshape the look of the community by promoting safe, functional and attractive development while unifying the aesthetic properties of buildings, making sure they blend into their surroundings, he said.

Nearly every building project in the city ends up before the Design Review Committee, however, and some have questioned whether that is good — or necessary.

Grace on Tuesday admitted the process could use some tweaking.

“The first place builders look is the zoning code to find the expectations of the community,” he said. “Design review is the second place. But there are some things that are supported by the zoning code that are not shared by design review. That’s why we want to put things in one place as best we can.”

Grace is facing a possible recall election. The group Stand Up Elyria has submitted petitions to the Lorain County Board of Elections and is awaiting word on whether there are enough valid signatures to go forward. That determination is expected to be completed by next week.

If there are enough valid signatures, Grace would be given five days to resign — which he has said he won’t do — or the city would have to schedule a special election, where voters will determine whether the two-term Democratic mayor should remain in office.

The October meeting, attended by many in the construction community, shed more light on the process as several people who went through the process critiqued it for City Council members.

“We all learned that there are points in the process that are very valuable, but obviously there were some stumbling issues with some businesses,” Callahan said.

Well-known businessman and former Grace confidant Dan Reaser led the charge and previously had called the process irrelevant and slow.

Other critics at the meeting suggested the city’s Building Department make more decisions with design review by using the zoning code as a road map. Grace said that with his planned changes to the process, that will be the case.

“The plan is to move things like signs, lighting and other things into zoning code, which will make it more straightforward and easy for people to understand what is expected of them,” he said.

By going into the zoning code, things that were once guidelines will become part of the code and enforceable by the Building Department.

In addition, red brick — often cited as the illustration for all that is wrong with the design review process — will no longer be recommended as the city’s top choice for a building, Grace said.

“Red brick has been portrayed as the requirement, but it is not. Many times, requests other than red are made and they are approved,” he said. “To clear up the misconception, the new guidelines will remove red brick as a building material recommendation.”

This is not the first time a moratorium on design review has been called for by a city leader.

After listening to debates about why the now-defunct Krazy Mac’s should not have an opaque sign, why FirstMerit Bank should have one and whether the owner of Heavy Duty Graphics, a local sign company that has since gone out of business, was in violation of design review guidelines for an 8-month-old sign on his building, Councilman Kevin Brubaker, D-at large, called for an assessment of the process.

But after some discussion, he let the request die.

Grace said the final touches on the revamp should be in place by early 2010.

Largely it will be an undertaking of the Community Development and Building departments. But more so, Grace said he would like to get the business community involved in the process in the meantime.

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.

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