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Wacky court opinion:
A company owns a nine-acre (four-hectare) piece of land (comprising three lots) that straddles the boundary between two municipalities, Allentown and Bethlehem. (This Google Maps link shows the location. This screenshot of the county's GIS map shows the municipal boundary.) The company wants to build a complex of four apartment buildings on the land. On this piece of land, Bethlehem's zone allows apartment buildings, but Allentown's zone does not, so the company is getting all the zoning approvals through Bethlehem.
More specifically, Bethlehem's zone allows an apartment building to be built only if there is a commercial use on its first floor, but this requirement is waived if the apartment building faces a "local street" rather than an "arterial street". The company asks the Bethlehem zoning board to rule that all four buildings in the complex count as facing North Wahneta Street in Allentown, which is a local street, even though building 4, when considered individually, actually faces West Broad Street in Bethlehem, which is an arterial street. Bolstering this argument, the complex's main entrance will be on North Wahneta Street, while there will be a fence blocking access from West Broad Street.
The Bethlehem zoning officer recommends that the petition be rejected, but the Bethlehem zoning board approves it anyway. Since the piece of land counts as a "corner lot" (indeed, it adjoins five different streets), the zoning code allows the company to choose whichever street it wants as the street that the entire lot faces, without considering individual buildings. And judicial precedent states that a zoning board can acknowledge the existence of land in a different municipality without being guilty of exercising its jurisdiction outside its own borders.* The Bethlehem government appeals**, along with several disgruntled single-family-residential neighbors who don't want to live next to an apartment complex, but the trial court affirms.
The appeals panel reverses. (1) Under the unique circumstances of this case, the Bethlehem zoning board actually is exercising its jurisdiction outside its own borders, because it is giving the nod to an apartment building that "faces" an Allentown street and sits partially on Allentown land but would be forbidden in Allentown's zone, enabling an end run around Allentown's zoning code. And (2) the designation of building 4 as facing a street that actually lies behind building 4 would run afoul of other parts of Bethlehem's zoning code (e. g., a prohibition on putting an apartment building's parking lot between the building and its front lot line), which the zoning board completely overlooked. Finally, even if those first two points were not valid, (3) there is not even any evidence in the record that North Wahneta Street counts as a local street under Bethlehem's zoning code in the first place! Therefore, building 4 must be considered to face West Broad Street in Bethlehem, not North Wahneta Street in Allentown.
*In that case: A company owned a 43-acre (17-hectare) piece of land straddling the boundary between two municipalities, Cheltenham and Springfield. Cheltenham's zoning code required a 100-foot (30-meter) setback from the property line. The Cheltenham govt. argued that this setback should also apply to the municipal boundary in the middle of the piece of land, but the Cheltenham zoning board rejected this argument**, and the trial court and the appeals panel affirmed. "Hamilton Hills is clearly distinguishable because it pertained to [whether a developer could count open space in one municipality toward another municipality's open-space requirement], not setback provisions. The zoning board simply found that the municipal boundary line was not a property line for measuring setbacks. In so concluding, the zoning board did not exert any control over land located in another municipality."
**Yes, in each of these two cases the government and the zoning board of the same municipality were opponents. Apparently, a zoning board is considered a quasi-judicial entity that is independent of the government that appointed all of its members.
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