Zoning Change Unlikely In Dispute Over Horse

When Tamie Lewis moved a horse into her back yard last August, she may have been remembering the good ol’ days when there was a barn, a corral and livestock on her family’s land.

Times change. So has the zoning in her neighborhood of small, mostly older homes just north of Trent and east of McDonald.

Now, after a neighbor complained that the horse violates a zoning ban on farm animals, Lewis is bucking the system in an effort to keep the pinto gelding at her home at 13216 E. Rich.

“There’s something called grandfather rights,” Lewis said.

That’s where Lewis’s case becomes a smidgen more complicated.

For her property to be entitled to “grandfather,” or non-conforming rights, Lewis must show that horses have been kept there continuously since before the neighborhood’s zoning was changed in the early 1980s to urban residential, said county zoning enforcement officer Allan deLaubenfels.

But, deLaubenfels said, Lewis’s father got rid of the horses that had grazed on the family’s two-acre parcel about 15 years ago, tore down the old barn and subdivided the land into three lots. Lewis lives in the original family home. Two new houses were built on the other lots.

Lewis already applied for non-conforming rights once this year, but was denied.

Lewis said she will ask again, but deLaubenfels said he’s skeptical the ruling will be reversed.

“The evidence that we have doesn’t support her contention that she has a valid appeal,” deLaubenfels said. “But she deserves a hearing, and she’ll get one if she wants.”

Lewis has yet to formally file for a new determination, so no hearing date has been set.

Several of Lewis’s neighbors expressed concern about whether the roughly 30-foot by 40-foot pen in her back yard is a suitable place to keep a horse.

Metal fenceposts lie precariously in the mud beneath the horse’s hooves and only a string of flimsy wire separates the gelding from neighbors’ yards.

Nicole Council, 15, who lives nearby, said the horse doesn’t bug her. They don’t even make as much noise as her own family’s pigeons. But the enclosure in Lewis’s yard, Council said, is just “too small.”

John Kapper, who lives next door to Lewis, glanced to where the pinto gelding is munching hay and wondered aloud whether the animal will fertilize his lawn this summer.

He already knows the horse is pushing down his fence. Kapper said Lewis promised three weeks ago that she would put up an electric fence to remedy that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“It’s just a mudhole. The horse is up to his ankles in mud,” Kapper said. “I just don’t know why that girl has to have a horse over there.”