In 2013, the two business owners acquired a special use permit, allowing them to run a business out of their home, which resides in an R3 zone — residential use only. One of the stipulations of the permit required that any signage associated with the business must be affixed to the building that holds the business.

The then-code enforcement officer, James Packanowski (who has since passed away), approached Kate and Steve and discussed the situation at hand, before asking them to give him a week to make a decision.

The Mayers claim that he came back seven days later and told them that their sign was fine, and they could keep it up in the middle of their yard.

The situation arose again in the fall of 2016, when the Mayers were told again that they were not in compliance with their special use permit. Due to the snow and frost surrounding the sign, however, the issue was tabled until, Kate claims, they could pick it back up again in May.

OBSERVER Photo by Amanda Dedie. Kate Mayer, owner of Gale Street Studio, approached the Westfield Village Board regarding a notification asking her to remove her business’ sign from her yard.

“May came and went, I didn’t hear anything. June came and went, nothing. Now I’ve got a letter telling me to remove it. There was no discussion, no agreement to work it out. Can we do something? I don’t know what my next step is,” Kate said to the board at the monthly July village board meeting.

“At some point, you must have realized, even if it was when you were talking to Mr. Packanowski, that (your sign) isn’t in compliance,” said Mayor Michael VandeVelde.

Kate retorted that there were a number of signs in the village, and wondered if they, too, were cited. Her and her husband took a road tour of the village and took pictures of any sign they could find that was not, as far as they knew, in the commercial district of the village.

“I’m not asking for anyone’s sign to be cited, because there’s no reason to,” said Steve.

VandeVelde stated that, to be honest, he knows nothing about this situation, as it was a decision made by the planning board, which has the legal right to make any decisions regarding the village codes without bringing it by the village board first. The next logical step, he said, would be to take the case to the Zoning Board of Appeals.

“(This) is a difficulty we have as a planning board, because we read the current sign and past sign regulations that were governed in 2012, and neither one of those laws that had been handed to us as a planning board allows for signs in (your) residential district,” said Don McCord, chair of the Westfield Planning Board, who happened to be in the audience.

Essentially, what this means is that certain signs are “grandfathered” in. For example, the regulations were amended in 2012 and then again in 2015. Any signs that were put up from 2012 until 2015 would follow the 2012 regulations. Any signs put in after the regulations were put into place in 2015 would have to follow the 2015 laws, even if their signs are different from those surrounding them, because they fall under a different set of regulations.

“Why is my residential district different from others?” Steve asked.

“The village board, or a board in the past, because the zoning law has been in place since ’85 and has been added to and modified over the years, has divided the village, as allowed in New York state law, into a series of districts,” explained McCord.

Then, of course, the Mayers wondered — why now? Why is this an issue almost four years later? It is, they say, a beautiful sign that isn’t hurting anyone.

The fact of the matter, the village stated, is that Packanowski, who is unfortunately unable to speak for himself, reportedly did something he was not supposed to do, which was let a situation slide when it should have gone through the proper channels for approval.

“Why all of a sudden after four years is this an issue? Why wasn’t this taken care of four years ago?” asked Trustee Jill Santi. “Why are we going to dismantle something that’s been around and cause a fuss when we could probably regroup somehow, instead of ripping something out of someone’s business area? What kind of message are we sending the village?”

Santi continued, “Are all the other signs in the entire Westfield area going to be cited and looked into to make sure they’re in compliance? Because if not, I don’t understand why you’re only going after one, because there are several signs that aren’t right, and I do know one sign that went up that they were just fined and then they were allowed to keep their sign.”

Current Code Enforcement Officer Bonnie Rae Strickland stated that the owners of that sign filled out the proper paperwork, approached the planning board and came to a compromise on that particular signage situation.

“This particular special use permit went in front of the planning board, and there were conditions of the special use permit, one which was parking, the other was very specifically where that sign would be,” Strickland stated. “And when you have someone else in the R3 district that wants to come in and points to that and says, ‘They have a sign, why can’t I have a sign?’ Next thing you know, you have signs everywhere.”

Steve remained insistent, however, that despite whether or not they had violated their variance in the first place, Packanowski said it was okay to keep the sign, despite having said so incorrectly, and without having the family go through the proper channels.

“Mr. Packanowski looked at it, we discussed it, he said give me a week and we’ll get back to you, and he did. … It was not an ongoing problem. … It came up last fall, and you’re deciding now,” Steve said. “… I said, ‘Mr. Packanowski, stupid me, bad me, we planned the sign, I honest to God didn’t think it was a bad thing. What are we going to do now? What are we going to do about it?’ He said, ‘Give me a week, let me see what I can do for you.’ A week later, he called me, he said, ‘Your sign’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ and for three years, we did not worry about it. Three years later, it’s a problem. Why did it take three years?”

VandeVelde did not have an answer for that, but stated that regardless of who said what and when, it comes down to the fact that Kate and Steve were in violation of the special use permit, which their business was granted under the condition that the sign for their business is attached to their house — and it isn’t.

“If you go back to the special use permit, you can see that it should have gone on your building, and we would not be here today. If you’d abided by the special use permit, we wouldn’t even be here talking.”

“I thought Mr. Packanowski did handle this situation, but now you’re telling me that Mr. Packanowski’s opinions and thoughts and doing his job meant nothing?” Steve questioned.

“What you’re saying is hearsay. We don’t know what Mr. Packanowski said, and he’s not here to answer. That’s what I just said,” VandeVelde corrected. “… The special use permit has certain criteria you needed to abide by. If you’d abided by that, we wouldn’t be here talking today.”

“If you read the special use permit, which I just recently did,” Steve said, implying he hadn’t read the permit when he first got it, “the sign needs to be connected to the building. I openly said I missed that. I could be a real idiot and show you 50 ways I could ‘connect’ it to the building.”

The sign is, as a matter of fact, now “connected” to the business with an orange rope. Strickland said in a followup interview with the OBSERVER that this does not constitute being “attached” to the building, no matter what Steve’s quoted definition from Webster’s Dictionary says.

VandeVelde then simply stated that the pair needed to go to the Zoning Board of Appeals, and followed that up with, “The village is going to support the planning board.”

Santi jumped onto the statement quickly, saying, “I would like to say I would like to support the community, the residents in this community, the businesses in this community — those people are the people that elected me to sit in this chair, to make decisions according to the greater good of this community.

“If that means the planning board has made the proper decision in which I agree with them, I support the planning board. If I feel there is some gray area and something else needs to be done, then I will voice that, as you all know I do.

“If we’re going to go after a sign, then we need to go back to 2013 when that sign went in the ground and look at every single special use permit to make sure they’re all in compliance. If you go after one, you have to go after everybody — otherwise you’re discriminating, and that is where I’m having a problem,” Santi concluded, to murmurs of agreement from the audience.

Kate then stated that the village’s website claims to support small, local businesses, but after this, doesn’t believe that to be true, and claims that a lot of people are leaving the Westfield area due to a lack of support from the board. Kate even went as far as to officially resign as the president of a local organization.

“If you can’t support us, then I cannot support the village of Westfield,” she said, before saying she would hand in an official letter of resignation at a later time.