City Council Member Tom Rasmussen says there’s nothing he can do to repair a proposal to preserve the Pike/Pine neighborhood’s buildings. He had launched a Pike/Pine preservation study last year, intending to “retain the character of the neighborhood” by providing protections for buildings that housed historic arts and nightlife uses. The Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Council (PPUNC), a coalition of developers and community leaders, applauded several approaches in Rasmussen’s proposal last fall: Limiting the floor area of new developments, giving developers incentive to build additions onto old buildings rather than tear them down, and allowing owners of old short buildings to sell the height above them to developers building on other sites. But after Rasmussen’s proposal went to the Department of Planning and Development, the proposal returned lacking those provisions.

Rasmussen says his hands are tied; the city’s lawyers balked at the proposal.

“They grabbed their chests and went pale. The law department doesn’t want to put the city at risk of … unfairly or illegally limiting what people can do with their property,” says Rasmussen. “Our state has some of the most restrictive provisions in its constitution and court cases in regards to what government can do in regards with land use.” So Rasmussen’s original suggestion to limit the size of a building’s footprint, for instance, was removed from the proposal.

“I don’t see why a city can’t take the initiative to decide what form of development it wants,” says Liz Dunn, a developer, preservationist, and member of the PPUNC steering committee. “We have lots of regulations that dictate things like height and building design, so it makes no sense to me that the same type of land-use regulations couldn’t be used to say there are neighborhoods where the building size shouldn’t exceed an appropriate scale.”

Dunn and others in PPUNC want the city to limit the footprint of new developments in Pike/Pine and provide financial incentives to preserve buildings more than 75 years old.

Rasmussen says he plans to introduce legislation this spring that lacks those provisions.