Companies fight for containers

Springfield City Council and its Community Involvement Committee requested another extension April 1 for the existing administrative delay on enforcement of storage container limits for city businesses.

The city first brought up the issue in 2000, according to Planning and Development Director Ralph Rognstad, after city staff noticed that some companies were employing storage containers on property not zoned accordingly.

“One of the problems, particularly in general retail (zoning), is that there’s no storage allowed outdoors, and this was considered outdoor storage,” Rognstad said, noting that council wanted to find a way to allow the containers, while staff felt they shouldn’t be allowed. “We felt like people ought to be building buildings if they needed storage, unless it truly was temporary.”

At that point, the city passed General Ordinance 5019, which limited businesses to one trailer or storage container per 10,000 square feet of building floor space for temporary use or one per 5,000 square feet for permanent containers.

The issue resurfaced in 2006, when council requested a review of the ordinance to make sure the established rules were being followed.

City staff proposed changes that would have required permits for all on-site storage and would have limited use of temporary containers to 60 days.

The city also placed an administrative delay on enforcement of the original ordinance to consider the proposed changes.

Those changes have met harsh criticism from both the manufacturing and retail sectors, whose members said the limits would severely hurt their ability to do business and noted that existing fire codes and zoning regulations already covered the issue.

The current administrative delay on the container law lasts through Sept. 11, but that may be extended.

Brenda Teeslink, owner of Mobile Storage Sales LLC, said the number of companies that showed up to oppose the proposed regulations, and the wide variety of industries they represented, helped convince the city to reconsider its stance.

“At the last meeting, there were 65 people representing more than 40 businesses, and a good portion of the city’s sales tax revenue was speaking at the meeting,” Teeslink said. “I think they saw that they were really about to mess things up for their sales tax revenue.”

Lack of on-site storage capabilities also could hurt retailers, according to Christine Moses, director of marketing for Battlefield Mall.

“Those types of storage units allow them to grow their sales and to continue to expand their business,” she said. “(Retailers) don’t have inventory taking up floor space, and it allows them to show their corporate (owners) that, ‘Hey, we’ve got the sales levels and we can expand our floor area,’ to justify renovations and expansions.”

The concerns of manufacturers and retailers were part of the reason some council members, including Mayor Pro Tem Gary Deaver, decided to voice their opposition to the proposal.

“The proposed ordinance … was intimidating in its length and needlessly attempted to register storage containers and trailer use in manufacturing and industrial areas,” Deaver said in an April 1 letter. “I suggest … a one-year moratorium on enforcement of the existing storage container ordinance.”

Paul Wilkerson, warehouse and logistics manager for NewStream Enterprises, said the industries’ increased self-policing efforts make the additional regulations unnecessary.

“I think people expect to see storage containers in a factory environment,” he said.

In his letter, Deaver agreed.

“In many cases, container placement in highway commercial and general retail areas has been corrected to have little or far less impact on neighbors,” he wrote.

Wilkerson said he’s glad the city has come around to see the potential harm the proposal could have caused, especially since the containers are part of the cost of doing business in the industrial sector.

“We have trucks that come and go and freight moving in and out – it’s part of the industrial world,” he said. “There are very few dangers with these trailers if used properly.”

Council’s Community Involvement Committee is expected to ask for a 12-month extension on that delay later this summer.