- Here’s the New York Times obit for Jim Dickinson, which has a good summary of his major credits.
- The Clarion Ledger has editorialized that the Mississippi Supreme Court should reconsider its decision that the Fairview decision was spot zoning:
The Fairview’s restaurant, Sophia’s, is an integral part of their business. It would be difficult for the Belhaven bed and breakfast to serve meals only to the guests in the 18-room inn without opening the dining room to the public.The lawsuit challenging the city’s zoning decision was filed by Mark and Anita Modak-Truran and Daniel and Katherine Baker, all of whom are lawyers and represented themselves.
The court’s decision discourages Jackson revitalization in a neighborhood that already has a plethora of mixed-use zoning. The Fairview and Sophia’s are assets to Jackson that should not be lost to petty zoning squabbles.
I need to go back and re-read this decision. What’s being lost in all the back-and-forth is whether the majority opinion is wrong as a matter of zoning law. Mississippi’s zoning cases have long shown a tendency to reverse decision could be said to be “spot zoning,” and this decision by the city sounds like spot zoning to me. I came away more impressed with the majority opinion than with the dissent, reading it before everyone in the neighborhood weighed in with their disagreement with the neighbors who opposed the change.
How absurd. If this isn’t advocacy of results-based jurisprudence, then nothing is.
Also, out of all the bodies of law that the Court has screwed up over the past few years, THIS is the case that the Ledger decides needs to be reconsidered?
Give me a break. If I’ve gotta choose between a newspaper that doesn’t care and a newspaper that doesn’t know what it’s talking about, then I’ll take the former.
The real concern is not what the Fairview is, but what it could become under new ownership and the proposed zoning change.
Mississippiman, you mean Jackson could become the home of “C Street South”?
Hey, if sacrificing lunch at the Fairview is what it takes to get BS’s architectural monstrosity in Ridgeland nixed, that works for me.
(Will the fact that they’ve gone on & built it weigh with the Court? The fait accompli didn’t work so well for Methodist when it built that would-be hospital on the frontage road in north Jackson, but perhaps those were different times.)
The definition of irony would be that Anitia Modak-Truran’s personal victory is the precedent to end the BS tower. Of course, we all know that won’t happen.
NMiss, don’t disagree that the majority opinion could be the better written opinion. But – and this is huge – is the majority opinion tied tightly to the record? Or is it well written but not well grounded on what was presented to the City Council and the trial judge?
Xenos, I have no way of knowing what’s in the record that is not reflected in the opinions; on the other hand, reading the opinions, I had the sense that the majority was closer than the dissent, because it was concrete in a way the dissent was not.