Scott County backs away from building restrictions

Scott County is backpedaling from what was threatening to become a messy public confrontation with its business community.

A proposal to ban the kinds of cheap-looking metal buildings that abound in rural areas was scrapped this week after business leaders warned that the county was going to scare off the job-creating small businesses it hopes to attract.

Jon Rausch, senior vice president of the commercial real estate firm NorthMarq, warned county officials in a letter dated Monday that the very thing they were seeking to outlaw was actually their competitive advantage over image-conscious communities closer to the urban center.

"The main benefit that Scott County offers to some of the other seven-county-metro communities," he wrote, "is that you allow for both outside storage and affordable construction" -- in other words, no buildings at all for some purposes and cheap ones for others.

Even though the county's planning manager signaled a pullback at the beginning of a public hearing Monday night, the meeting of the county's planning commission still stretched to three hours, partly because a string of speakers warned of dire consequences from such a ban.

"We're going to have a hard time attracting anybody over the next few years," regardless of the rules, warned Bruce Malkerson, whose family owns 600 acres of industrial property in two rural townships. "We've had signs on our property for years without anyone ever calling."

The warnings resonate because one of the county's top priorities is to jump-start job creation in an era when the prospects for major new road or transit connections to jobs elsewhere seem dim.

• Steel panels will need to be up to certain technical specifications for quality and durability, and builders will have to ensure that they don't get dinged up over the years.

• The county will still impose its first-ever architectural design rules for commercial buildings in rural townships. Forbidden will be such things as 100-foot-long blank walls without any touches of visual interest.

• There will also be more specific landscaping standards, replacing vague admonitions to make things look leafy with specific requirements.

Grateful for the concessions on the metal building issue, business owners didn't contest most of these rules. But some did seem perplexed by the concern over aesthetics for buildings that they say few outsiders ever see.

Even when they can see them, wrote Mark Pahl, who runs Dem-Con Cos. in Louisville Township, "the difference between a steel building and nonsteel building cannot be distinguished from cars driving by the buildings."