Northbrook Ham Pushes to Allow Zoning Exception Front-Yard Antenna:

Should there be a way for government to give one person the right, just one time, to exceed the letter of the law, without changing that law for all time for everybody that comes after that person? Gregg Salomone hopes there is. He wants to put up a 26-foot ham radio antenna in his Northbrook front yard, if all his neighbors say they are OK with it, which he thinks they are. Some Northbrook officials say they'd like to accommodate him, in that case, as long as everybody in the village didn't therefore get the right, along with him, to do it. While it would be perfectly legal in Salomone's backyard, should the front yard have another set of rules entirely? He has too tiny of a backyard for the spider-like underground cable supporting the antenna to fit. His case is part of the impetus behind a 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 Northbrook Village Board discussion about what Northbrook's building and development director Tom Poupard calls legislation to allow "major variations" without making text amendments to the village's zoning code. Northbrook's Village Board members could decide, case by case, to make the exceptions, on their own, with or without public hearings either at the village's Zoning Board of Appeals or Plan Commission to generate recommendations. Some towns already have similar laws. The idea has been percolating in Northbrook at least since 2015, when a resident who had just bought a house in the 1000 block of Meadow Road needed to enclose a balcony to stop a leak. But that enclosure would make his house's floor space 64 square feet too big to comply with Northbrook's floor-area-ratio limit of 40 percent under roof, compared to the size of the land the house sat on. That homeowner wound up having to go through a complex process for an exception that included two public hearings. The village board was not quite on board yet for the "major variation" system that Poupard had suggested, and then had been recommended by the Plan Commission. That was partly because such easier changes could mean a new way to get around codes for profit, Trustee A. C. Buehler said in 2015. "Whatever we create, we want to make sure we don't say to the architect, 'If you do this, you wind up with another 2 percent,'" he said.

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