Midway work meeting explores stricter Main Street zoning, short-term rental limits

Midway planning staff brought proposed redline changes to the city's Main Street commercial zoning at a council work meeting, recommending limits on certain uses, new size caps for retail and accessory buildings, and a cleanup of short-term rental definitions.

"The idea today is to talk about a number of different items and plant some seeds with you," Michael (staff member) said at the meeting as he introduced the draft revisions to the C2 and C3 commercial zones.

The draft aims to make the C3 zone (the more walkable area around the town square) focused on active ground-floor uses such as restaurants and retail, while allowing offices and clinics above or below the ground floor. Among the specific numeric limits in the packet: grocery stores would remain permitted up to roughly 22,000 square feet; retail and showroom footprints would be capped at 15,000 square feet; and engraving/printing uses would require at least 1,500 square feet of retail area to prevent nonretail operations masking as retail.

Planning staff proposed removing vehicle-oriented uses from both C2 and C3 (including new and used vehicle sales and car washes) so those businesses would become nonconforming if they remained. Alcohol-dispensing establishments would remain conditional in both zones with local consent. Assisted-living and similar residential care facilities were discussed as residential uses limited to small group-home scales: staff repeated a long-standing rule of roughly an eight-resident threshold for those settings when treated as housing rather than a commercial care facility.

Short-term rentals and hotels drew sustained attention. Michael (staff member) told the council he would "get rid of the 2 day requirement for short term rentals" and instead align definitions so nightly rentals and short-term lodging are consistent in the code. Council members discussed whether standalone hotels should be allowed in C2 and C3, given the town's existing resort-zone accommodations; a number of members suggested removing "hotels and motels" from the C2/C3 allowed uses and instead permitting limited nightly rentals only as mixed-use projects with commercial on the ground floor.

"Permitted means I get to do anything. I don't know," Jeff (council member) said, cautioning staff to make the code language defensible and clear that permitted uses may still be subject to location or floor restrictions. Council members also proposed a per-parcel cap as a safeguard against large-scale conversions: one council member suggested limiting nightly-rental units per property to eight as a starting point, and others discussed combining per-parcel caps with density or per-acre limits to avoid unintended large developments.

The draft would also add a 50-foot front setback in the C3 zone to discourage parking lots directly abutting Main Street, and it would limit secondary commercial building footprints to roughly 12,000 square feet on multi-building commercial parcels. Staff flagged a need for clearer language around what constitutes an accessory commercial structure versus a second principal building so the rule cannot be easily bypassed.

On mapping, staff proposed expanding the C3 designation on the south side of Main Street to mirror the north side, covering the core blocks around the town square and Midway Mercantile to first east, to preserve a contiguous walkable retail core. Michael (staff member) said the proposed rezones would be limited to a few half blocks and would require the usual noticing process for property owners in rezoned areas.

The council did not take formal votes on the items at the work meeting. Instead, members gave direction to staff to refine code language (including Title 6 business-license definitions related to nightly and short-term rentals), run the revisions by the city attorney for legal review, and return with clearer draft ordinance language and mapping options. The item will return to a future work meeting for follow-up review and formal action.