On October 26, 2009 The McKeevers appeared before the Sac City Council to ask them to solve a problem with the alley that runs through their property.
The McKeevers own about one city block. Their house sits on one side of the block, and their garage sits on the other side of the block. Mr. McKeever applied for a permit to expand the size of his garage, but was denied that permit because it was discovered that an alley ran through the middle of the block underneath the area where he wanted to expand the garage.
The first proposed way around the problem was to build a garage that sits on the other side of the block and doesn’t extend out onto the alley. Unfortunately there is a Sac City zoning ordinance that does not allow accessory buildings to go up on a non-adjacent property or across the alley in this case. (See non scale roughly copied map above) the existing garage was grandfathered in with the creation of the “non-adjacent’ law, but a garage with a new footprint is not allowed.
The alley is apparently going to be vacated and sold to the McKeevers, but that is a process that will take several months, and the couple wanted to start building immediately. The Sac City Council is the only body in town with the authority to grant them the right to build on a non-adjacent property, thus the real reason for their evening’s visit with the city council.
Before moving to approve the permit, Councilman Brian Muska brought up another very valid side point. Upon learning that the McKeevers had been maintaining the alley as a lawn for the last 23 years, he suggested that they should not even have to pay to buy the property from the city.
Without addressing whether they would just give the property to the McKeevers, the city council enthusiastically granted them a permit to start building their garage on the non-adjacent property immediately.
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