Shipping container ordinance won’t set sail again

A little more than a year ago, the Oneida County board of supervisors narrowly grounded a proposed ordinance that would have imposed countywide zoning regulations for shipping containers, with the effort failing on a no-margin-for-error 8-8 tie vote.

Given the closeness, it’s hardly a shock that some supervisors from the Lakeland area — in particular supervisor Billy Fried — have wanted to bring it back for reconsideration.

And in September, after receiving a reconsideration request from Fried, the county zoning committee decided to resurvey the county’s 20 towns to see how they feel about bringing the defeated ordinance back to life.

The committee now has its answer and the survey says: Most towns apparently could care less about imposing shipping container regulations or bringing the resolution back.

Indeed, most towns didn’t even bother answering the survey. That seemed to surprise Oneida County zoning director Karl Jennrich, though his surprise was hardly a surprise, given the hot-button nature of the topic. 

“So yes, the committee asked me to send out a notice to the towns regarding that defeated ordinance amendment to see whether or not towns wanted it brought back,” Jennrich told the committee earlier this month. “I don’t know what to say. This one’s interesting.”

The zoning director then rattled off the names of towns that had not responded: Cassian. Crescent. Enterprise. Little Rice. Lynne. Monico. Pelican. Piehl. Nokomis. Schoepke. Stella. Three Lakes. 

Newbold, Sugar Camp, and Woodboro responded, but were opposed to reconsideration. Minocqua and Woodruff supported reconsideration of the defeated ordinance, while Lake Tomahawk and Hazelhurst would support revisiting the ordinance.

So, as zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski summed it up, only a third of the towns bothered to respond, and, of those who did, only the towns in the Lakeland area supported reconsideration. 

The problem for many is, the ordinance would have regulated the placement of shipping containers and semi-trailers countywide, even in towns that don’t want any regulation. Specifically, under the proposed ordinance, shipping containers could not have been placed permanently in single family zoning districts and in multiple family residential districts, and their number would have been restricted in certain other zoning districts. Shipping containers also could not be stacked.

Jennrich has said the purpose of the ordinance was to clarify when permits were needed as well as specific exemptions from those permits. The ordinance would also have set minimum requirements, established setbacks for the structures, and it would have allowed up to two shipping containers in all zoning districts for up to 45 days for temporary storage, and at construction sites for the duration of the project, to be removed within 45 days of the project’s completion or upon the permit’s expiration.

Jennrich said the effort to target the placement of shipping containers and semi-trailers began in earnest after the zoning department received concerns from both individuals and towns, particularly the town of Minocqua. 

Other options

With such lackluster response to the survey and a general lack of support, the committee last week quickly dispensed with any notion of reconsideration, which supervisor and Woodruff town chairman Mike Timmons acknowledged was the right thing to do.

“That’s telling us they don’t want anything to do with it, that they don’t care,” Timmons said about the response to the survey.

Jennrich said the committee could kill it or send the language back to public hearing and see if the towns would then formally respond.

Timmons demurred on the latter, saying the only thing to do was to look at the ordinance and see if something could be created to accommodate the Lakeland area — where support for the ordinance is clustered — but other than that, he said of the other towns, “We can’t impose on them.”

Of course, Jennrich replied, the board could if it wanted to, but Timmons said that would be not be the right way to go.

“We could but it’s not the proper way of doing things,” he said. “I sure don’t want Sugar Camp coming into Woodruff and telling us what to do.”

Supervisor Bob Almekinder agreed, saying he could not see a few towns imposing their will on everyone else.

But other options do exist, and Holewinski asked Jennrich if he had researched the idea of an overlay district. An overlay district places a special zoning “layer” on top of the primary zoning district, and the overlay standards supersede or apply on top of those of the underlying primary district.

For shipping containers, an overlay district prohibiting or regulating shipping containers would be laid over all zoning districts in the county where towns wanted to prohibit or regulate the containers. 

In other words, the primary district would hold legal sway, except for the specific regulations of the overlay district.

But overlay containers can be problematic. For example, one town might subject its single family residential districts to the overlay, while another town might choose not to overlay the special district over its single family residential zoning districts, setting up different treatments of properties within the county’s same primary zoning districts.

In his research, Jennrich said Oneida County had in fact had an overlay district in the past — for manufactured homes.

“The only thing I can state is that back in the day, because I was researching old ordinances, in particular for campgrounds, there was an overlay district based on legal descriptions for the size of structures,” he said. “Oneida County is probably one of the first counties that attempted to prohibit a placement of manufactured mobile homes. I believe that history is, without looking into details, that Oneida County was challenged. It was found discriminatory because you were picking on one type of housing versus another type of housing.”

So, Jennrich said, the county created four overlay districts: Number 1 required a minimum 720 square feet and 24 feet in width; numbers 2 and 3 were slightly different versions; and number 4 allowed mobile homes.

“That was adopted by towns so that every town divvied up their town into legal descriptions of where they wanted larger type homes,” he said. “Some of them may have also done it by zoning district, but again we did that and that was the only thing that we really did as ‘an overlay.’”

But Jennrich said he doubted the county corporation counsel would approve of overlay districts.

“I would have to press counsel to see whether or not you could treat single family residential in the town of let’s say Minocqua differently than single family in the town of Woodruff for the placement of let’s say these type of structures,” he said. “I’ve always been brainwashed that if the property zoning is the same, you have to treat that zoning district the same.”

Holewinski agreed that asking the corporation counsel would be a waste of time, but he said there was another option—not an overlay district but an entirely new residential zoning district that would regulate the containers. Similar to the county’s Forestry 1-A and Forestry 1-B and Forestry 1-C, towns could create different versions of single family residential, some prohibiting or regulating shipping containers. The principal difference from an overlay district is that the towns would have to rezone those areas where they wanted to have the new districts. 

“For example the town of Nokomis is going through a comprehensive rezone,” Jennrich said. “They’re starting the process of taking a look at their zoning and going from general use to other zoning districts. They are adopting a lot of Forestry 1-C. As of today, Forestry 1-C only exists in one town, the town of Hazelhurst. They are looking at adopting rural residential, which really is only in the town of Minocqua, and I think rural residential and residential retail were created for the town of Minocqua and Business B6.”

Those zoning districts were created just for such special goals, Jennrich said.

“So yes, a zoning district be created, it’s just it could become burdensome for those towns,” he said. “Then I can work with them to create that zoning district. They’d have to go through the process of rezoning various portions of their town to that different type of zoning district to effectuate the change. And that’s the same thing.”

Jennrich recalled that Three Lakes wanted to allow horses in single family residential. After going to the towns for input, the county offered to create a new zoning district to allow horses, but it would have required Three Lakes to rezone.

“They weren’t super happy to create a new zoning district and they sort of dropped it,” he said.

In Minocqua’s Business B-6, because it is unique, Jennrich said he could work with the town to craft a new regulation within the existing zoning.

“Actually if they did not want them [shipping containers] in that, I think I could help them,” he said. “That could be written in if they don’t want them, portable storage, in Business B-6.”

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.