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| Bed and breakfast dispute sheds light on code issues |
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| News - Miami County News | |||
| Written by Robin Hixson | |||
| Wednesday, 07 January 2009 08:00 | |||
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Area businessman Mike Hursey is blazing the trail for future bed and breakfast owners. Although Hursey may still have to install a sprinkler system to open a bed and breakfast in his Somerset home, his struggle with interpretation of codes has helped speed the development of more coherent Miami County zoning regulations for such establishments. The Miami County Commission approved several amendments to its zoning regulations for bed and breakfasts Wednesday, prompted by Hursey’s situation but not addressing the sprinkler system requirement, which the Miami County Board of Zoning Appeals has already upheld and he continues to a appeal. Planning Director Charlene Weiss presented the amended regulations Wednesday, after she and her staff developed them in response to the commission’s earlier request for review — prompted by Hursey’s appeal — and suggestions for changes. A bed and breakfast facility is now defined as “A single-family dwelling that operates as a boarding house where, for compensation and by pre-arrangement for definite periods, meals and/or lodging are provided for guests and where individual cooking facilities are not provided. A boarding house in this context means any single-famly residential structure which is kept, maintained, advertised or held out to the public to be a place where sleeping accommodations are furnished for pay to transient guests and in which eight (8) or fewer guests may be accommodated.” The amended regulations specify a bed and breakfast facility shall be made to resemble a single-family dwelling in respect to its appearance and function. Also, all such facilities shall contain a dwelling unit occupied by the proprietor or owner and there shall be no lockable doors or permanent barriers between guest quarters and those of the proprietor or owner that would create two separate dwellings. All bed and breakfasts in Miami County must comply with county and state requirements and licenses that apply to lodging facilities. Use of manufactured or modular structures as bed and breakfasts is prohibited. The commission did stipulate an additional change in the regulations as a condition of its approval. The requirement that a bed and breakfast must not exceed five bedrooms was changed to read that it must not exceed four guest bedrooms and one for the owners or operators. Hursey, who operates a catering business called Casa Somerset out of his home at 16350 W. 287th St., is building a multi-bedroom facility there to operate as a bed and breakfast but had no plans to install sprinklers, as each bedroom will have direct access to the outside, and older bed and breakfasts in the county are not required to have sprinklers. In October, the Miami County Board of Zoning Appeals upheld a ruling by county staff that Hursey’s establishment would fall under an R-1 occupancy, similar to that of a boardinghouse, and would therefore need to have a sprinkler system installed.
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