To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short of scandalous, a historical desecration just blocks from the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee.

But to Michael Zarlenga, it’s justice.

“I’m not just the owner of Le Tache, I’m also …”

Zarlenga spent $350,000 on plans to expand his hunting and fishing store, the Trophy Room.  

However laudable may be our historic preservation statutes, their procedures are archaic and arbitrary, prone to abuse, and opaque to judicial or legislative review – much less by an ordinary citizen.

He worked with city officials for almost two years and thought he had their support — until the architectural review board told him he couldn’t alter the historic property.

My procedures are Byzantine

In other words, after two years, the taste police changed their minds.

“Remember when I promised to approve your proposal?”

“Yes, yes!  You did!”

“I lied.”

What could the outraged citizen do?  He couldn’t sue the town, because its procedures state quite clearly they’re arbitrary.  Instead, he thought of a more practical revenge:

Furious and out of money, Zarlenga rented the space to its newest occupant, Le Tache.

“I can’t say I didn’t know it would ruffle feathers,” said Zarlenga, 41. “Actually, I was hoping for a fast-food chain because I thought that would be more annoying to the city.”

It may not be historic but it meets the zoning

As I wrote in a similar case in Lexington, MA, entitled Zoning and the Righteous Snobs, it appears that the use restrictions were written not for their stated purpose, but rather to enable the town to exercise a capricious veto over any use that it didn’t like:

Like the bigot who likes ’some of  your kind,’ Wellesley is perfectly willing to embrace upscale economic immigrants; it’s those slightly dirty downscale types we want to keep out altogether or at the very least out of sight:

 There are also other Dunkin’ Donuts franchises, though they are well out of view, in outlying corners of the town, or, in one case, tucked inside a Mobil gas station.

Good thing those people know their place.

The new Dunkin’ Donuts shop was all the more alarming to town officials because it seemed to slip, for a time, below the radar.

What skullduggery.  What deceit.

The owner, who declined to speak to the Globe,

 “Would you like to go on the record, sir?”

signed a lease late last year for the space when a bakery that sold handmade breads vacated the space, according to town officials and court papers.

Isn’t it just like an upstart to think that replacing one bakery with another requires no permission?

A similar cultural snobbery appears evident from the historic board’s past practice:

King Street’s upscale restaurants and shops are the quintessence of commercial Old Town, near Gadsby’s Tavern, where George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams overnighted.

Upscale restaurants are delightful, and personally I’d rather have one nearby than a sex shop

A short stroll away is the boyhood home of Lee, the Confederate general.

“I believe it’s an inappropriate business to be located in our old and historic district,” Alexandria Mayor William D. Euille (D) said of Le Tache.

As Alexandria was a river port, I am sure a search of the records will reveal plenty of brothels within the historic district. 

“I get e-mails and calls every day from people who want us to do something to make the business leave.”

Le Tache, Mayor Euille wishes Euid leave …

Not everyone agrees.  A quick Google reveals the following interesting comment to an Alexandria Times article:

Considering the amount of vacant real estate I see in Old Town and the Carlyle Square these days, Alexandria should be courting businesses instead of chasing them off.  I for one am tired of seeing the City Budget increase and my real estate tax rate increase every year to fund some misguided social program or another. Having more businesses in Old Towne filling that vacant space would be a welcome relief to the City’s homeowners and diversify the City’s tax base, making it better able to stand up to recessions that we are in now.

Cities make money on commercial property, if it’s occupied – if it’s vacant, it’s a net drain.

Really? 

In other words, Mayor Euille, the district isn’t historic, it’s use-controlled.

The store opened in January to both horrified and curious passersby at 210 King St., next to an art gallery and two doors from a boutique that sells children’s clothing.  Le Tache owner Bo Kenney said sales are booming, even in this economy.

Everyone knows that apartments have bedrooms, and in those bedrooms are beds, and we know what happens there, don’t we?

Sneaking out to head back home: Le Tache from the inside

“People like our products. They want that escape, and that’s what we’re trying to do — give them a little pleasure in their day,” said Kenney, who owns nine similar shops in Northern Virginia. “We’re doing a community service.”

Feels pretty Puritan, doesn’t it?

In the windows of Le Tache, which means the spot [And it should be feminine, La Tache – Ed.], scantily dressed, voluptuous mannequins beckon.

May I help you?

Peekaboo lingerie, adult movies and sex toys are displayed throughout the three-story building, which has the original hardwood floors and beams dating to the early 1800s.

The city cannot act because the store is complying with the law. “There’s nothing I can do to encourage its demise,” the mayor said.

But he added that city staff is drawing up proposed changes to zoning laws in hopes that future adult entertainment stores can be regulated.

Heaven forbid that you’d re-examine you historic-use approval processes!

Self-reflection is only for the young

Le Tache would be grandfathered in.

Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney S. Randolph Sengel said his office has received enough complaints about the store that he is looking at legal options.

Virginia law allows for courts to declare sexual material obscene and to ban its sale, he said.

“What is acceptable in one community might not meet the standard in the neighboring community,” Sengel said.

Nice sex shop.  Pit if something were to – happen – to it.

As the same Alexandria Times reader commented:

Wonderful. Simply wonderful. So, even if a business in the City is following the law, the City is going to harass it until it leaves. Nice thinking. Let’s let even more of the vacant storefronts in King Street sit empty due to stupidity in the City Council.

Heaven forbid you’d examine your historic-use approval processes!

The unexamined life is not worth administratively reviewing

Kenney, who says he caters to couples, had no retail presence in Old Town before because he hadn’t found a receptive landlord. But in Zarlenga, he got an owner who didn’t mind rankling city leaders.

If you weren’t already sympathetic to Mr. Zarlenga, just listen to this story of local processes run amok:

Zarlenga’s saga with the building dates to 2001, when he opened his hunting and fishing store.

Good neighbor, local businessman makes good.

In 2006, he bought the building with the idea of renovating and expanding it to include more retail space, a bathroom and an elevator.

He gave the community a choice:

He hired a Washington architectural firm, which created eight designs for the project.

Eight designs ought to be enough

The final one included plans to raise the roof on the back of the building and demolish a small section of a historic brick wall that was built about 1800. Most of the back wall would have been incorporated into the renovation.

In designing these tasteful choices, Mr. Zarlenga relied on advice from appropriate government officials:

Zarlenga said he consulted Alexandria’s historical preservation staff along the way to be sure everyone was on board with his plans. He said he relied heavily on the advice of Peter Smith, who at the time was the principal staff member of the city’s Board of Architectural Review.

But when the project came before the review board in 2007, it was rejected partly on Smith’s recommendation that it would cause an “unreasonable loss of historic fabric.”

As the Otter said to the Flounder, “You fucked up.  You trusted us.”

Never trust an Otter

Zarlenga said Smith did not explain to him why he changed his mind. Smith has since died.

Tom Hulfish, chairman of the Alexandria Board of Architectural Review, said the project was rejected because it would have altered the traditional “flounder,” or shed roof structure that preservationists are trying to protect around the city.

Are you trying to alter the traditional Flounder?

Zarlenga said he felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under him.

I’d say it definitely had.

He appealed to the City Council but lost in September 2007. Council members suggested he go back to the staff of the architectural review board and submit new plans.

A classic gutless punt – we’re not rejecting, you can try again to exhaust the futile and expensive administrative procedure you just went through.

“Pay no attention to that city council – return to the architectural review board!”

For Zarlenga, it was the final straw. He choked back tears as he told the council he was finished: “I have no faith in the staff…. They have completely taken the integrity, as I see it, out of the system… The simple fact is there’s no money left, okay?”

He closed his store and the building sat empty until January, when Le Tache opened.

Zarlenga said he has no regrets about renting to the sex shop, and he is selling the building to Le Tache’s owners.

The community has no one to blame but its architectural review board.  Lulled into a false sense of superiority by their unilateral and arbitrary procedures, they prevented Mr. Zarlenga from doing what he wanted – expanding his hunting and fishing store – to the point where he had to sell to something that didn’t need to change the building. 

Bob King, who owns an adjacent building and lives upstairs, said he’s concerned about his property values. “My preference would be [that] it not be my neighbor next door,” he said.

Heaven forbid you’d re-examine your NIMBYite approval processes.

We’re ready to appoint a study committee now

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Yesterday we saw that Disney, Anaheim’s biggest employer, though it had lost a 3-2 city council vote regarding a proposed high-end residential development, was suing the city to block it and had secured support of at least one useful person, Anaheim’s mayor, Curt Pringle.

We’re friends with the mayor!

Mayor Pringle was apparently persuaded by the arguments of Disney’s spokesman:

Mr. Doughty of Disneyland said that hotels and restaurants, which operate around the clock, are incompatible with permanent housing. “It doesn’t matter that it’s low-income housing,” he said –

The proposed development is 85% condominium, hardly low-income, and I would be astonished if the remaining 15% were not workforce housing.

– explaining that Disney objects to any new housing in the resort area.

In other words, Disney wants more Disneyland in the area. This is sounding more and more as if Disney simply covets the site for its own purposes.

“How dare you say we have ulterior motives!”

Indeed, the company has recently voiced its objection to another proposed project, called Parc Anaheim, at the edge of the resort area.

“We’re really for affordable housing, just no property you can possibly imagine.”

The SunCal site is about a mile from the Magic Kingdom and half a mile from the company’s second Anaheim theme park, Disney’s California Adventure, which opened in 2001.

But it is directly opposite an 88-acre plot on which Disney is considering building a third Anaheim theme park, which is likely to include boutique attractions. (In Orlando, one such attraction, Disney’s Discovery Cove, costs $249 a day to enter — a price that includes a chance to swim with dolphins.)

Mr. Doughty confirmed that the third park was a possibility, but said it would probably not be announced this year.

Evidently Disneyland’s growth is landlocked, chafing at its growth:

In the 1990s, Disney actually considered expanding its Southern California theme park operations outside Anaheim. (After learning its lesson in Anaheim, where it failed to buy enough land for its future growth, the company bought more than 25,000 acres in Florida before opening Walt Disney World in 1971.)

While Disney may wish to expand, and Anaheim may wish that too, Anaheim also needs more housing:

Cynthia Ward, an architectural historian who lives in Anaheim, said that “there is essentially no place left to live in Orange County for people with extremely low-income jobs,” but that, even so, the resort area should be protected. “Yes, we need affordable housing,” she said, “but it doesn’t have to be on that site.” The median home price in the county last year was more than $600,000.

From the 1960s until the 1980s, the area outside Disneyland “really deteriorated,” Ms. Ward said. Its rows of cheap hotels and restaurants, she said, “were tacky and disjointed.”

Instead of building elsewhere, Disney persuaded Anaheim to create the resort area, whose main streets were then turned into idyllic palm-tree-lined corridors leading to the theme parks. “Sometimes, people who live in Anaheim complain that they’re not getting the same street improvements,” Ms. Ward said. “But we understand how much money tourism brings.”

To pay for the improvements, the city levied a “bed tax” on hotels in the resort area.

Taxes are fun in bed!

Generally known as a soak-the-tourists tax, a favorite of mayors everywhere.

That tax now brings Anaheim some $80 million a year — which, when combined with sales and property taxes from the resort, represent more than a third of the city’s general fund. The bed tax revenue is expected to increase as more hotels are built, and Mayor Pringle said the city had already borrowed against that anticipated revenue.

That’s a fascinating tidbit, since it gives the city a huge financial interest in seeing more hotels go up, because they’ve already funded improvements (read: generated current political capital) based on the economically implicit promise of doing what Disney wants.

Promise me you’ll let me build more hotels and resorts

That, he said, means that a failure to build more hotels in the resort district could cloud the city’s economic future.

Pretty tawdry and short-sighted behavior in my view.

Your future has been hocked here

Disney’s plan to protect its interests has gone beyond suing the city. It has called for a referendum that would allow voters to overturn the City Council’s decision. That could come to a vote next February, Mr. Pringle said.

We thus see that Disney is mounting a multi-front campaign.

“We got lots o’ different arguments, we’re gonna use ‘em all.”

The lawsuit is probably a dead loser, but it creates political pressure, on the three beleaguered city councilors, and potentially on the voters as well. Finally, if you want to know the absolute tipoff that Disney knows its legal case is insubstantial, here it is:

And the company is behind a separate voter initiative that would make the resort zoning part of Anaheim’s city charter. “It would lock in permanently the boundaries of the resort area,” Mr. Doughty said.

So, Mr. Doughty, if (as you said before), “companies like Marriott and Disney and Hilton make their investment decisions on what they assume the zoning is going to be,” then they wouldn’t need this voter initiative, would they?

The voter initiative is being pushed by an organization called SOAR, for Save Our Anaheim Resort. Opponents of the initiative who favor the low-income housing have their own acronym: Yimby, for “Yes in Mickey’s Backyard.”

Mr. Elfend of SunCal called Disney’s tactics “very heavy-handed.”

Look, look, we’re not really for affordable housing, Mr. Mouse!

I agree with Mr. Elfend.

“Historically,” he said, “they’ve had so much power in Anaheim that they think they can control the development of land they don’t even own.”

It certainly seems that way.

But Mr. Doughty said, “It’s not just about this one development — if one developer is allowed to build residential in the resort area, others will follow.”

Goodness — you mean people might actually want to live here?

If you let people move in, God knows what will happen next!

Mr. Doughty said that Disney supported the building of affordable housing in other locations.

Anywhere but where Disney wants to build.

“Anaheim and Orange County have to address the affordable housing issue, but Anaheim also has to protect the resort area,” he said. “It’s not an either/or.”

Recognizing the potential for a black eye, Disney’s CEO Robert Iger, recently tried to sound like a good neighbor:

I speak for the mouse around here.

“We believe that there should be affordable housing in this area, that is it’s an effort that should be a partnership between the local government and a number of businesses,” Iger said. “Given all of the employees, or cast members as we call them, that we have here, we believe that giving them affordable housing in an area that’s proximate to their place of work is something that we should all work to create. But we don’t believe that the property that’s being talked about is property that should be developed for housing. We just don’t believe it’s what’s called recreation- or business-friendly, nor would it throw off as much in taxes as the businesses that could go into that place.”

There it is, folks — NIMBYism and self-interest, neatly packaged.

Walt must be spinning in his grave.

And we make sure no poor people live there, okay Walt?

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And then there is Disney, which appears to be doing everything it can to keep ‘those’ people — who make the Magic Kingdom go — living far away from Disneyland.

Bring your children, bring your dollars, but don’t try to live near us

As reported in the New York Times:

For 52 years, the Walt Disney Company has called Disneyland, its Southern California theme park, “the happiest place on earth.”

But now Disney is angry that the city of Anaheim, where the park is based, has approved plans for 1,500 apartments on a site zoned for tourist facilities.

In February, Disney sued the city, hoping to force it to abandon the decision permitting the project. The development would have 225 subsidized units, and advocates of affordable housing are accusing Disney of turning its back on low-income residents, including many of its own employees.

“Yes, here’s the passage — tort liability.”

Disney argues that it is simply trying to make Anaheim an attractive place for tourists. In the 1950s, Walt Disney, the company’s founder, bought 244 acres in Anaheim, for which he paid about $4,500 an acre. By the time the park opened, in 1955, Disney wished it had bought more.

In fact, Disneyland’s success spawned thousands of acres of development around the park including some that the company found tacky. The disputes that arose have forced Anaheim to take sides, and it has almost always taken Disney’s.

But the relationship between Anaheim and its largest employer has become strained over the planned housing, on a 26-acre site that now holds a trailer park.

Thanks, New York Times, for perpetuating stereotypes.

I’ve previously documented that mobile home parks are a very low-value use of land — because they are single-story, and therefore inefficient use of the development space — so I endorse the idea of creating high-density, mixed-income housing (provided, of course, that the existing mobile home park residents have their rights respected and a reasonable relocation plan). Swapping mobile homes for 1,500 apartments (sixty to the acre, meaning mid-rise and high-rise), of which 225 will be affordable, has got to be in Anaheim’s long run interest — and in the interest of its lower-income households:

Theresa Medina, an Anaheim resident, was visiting relatives at the trailer park this month. She said that one-bedroom apartments in Anaheim can cost $1,400 a month, and that many landlords won’t rent to large families.

Such inclusionary-zoning-style housing affordability also eases both Anaheim’s traffic burden and its workers’ total occupancy costs:

The prices and the occupancy restrictions cause many workers to commute long distances to Anaheim, she said.

Affordable housing not wanted here

Lorri Galloway, one of three on the five-member Anaheim City Council who voted in favor of the housing project, said, “Research shows that we have a need in and around the resort area for 27,000 units of affordable housing.”

Anaheim resident for 29 years

In other words, the proposed development, dense though it will be, will add supply equal to about 6% of Anaheim’s overall need, and the affordable component will be less than 1% of the demand.

By trying to block some of that housing, she said, Disney is showing “complete disregard for the workers who make the resorts so successful.”

Ms. Galloway is right.

But Rob Doughty, a spokesman for the Disneyland Resort, said the goal was simply to keep housing ['those' people NIMBYism -- Ed.] out of an area zoned for resort development in 1994.

Once the special zoning district was created, “the state and federal governments invested billions of dollars to clean it up,” Mr. Doughty said.

Mr. Doughty’s logic is backwards.

No, I’m building up logical momentum

If the state and federal government invested billions to make the property — including Disney’s property — more valuable, does that give the government even more moral standing to change the zoning in the public interest?

Disney and other companies then began building lavish facilities, including Disney’s 745-room Grand Californian Hotel and Spa, which opened in 2001. “And now they want to throw all that away,” he said, referring to the City Council.

Here too Mr. Doughty is tacitly appealing to prejudice, because he is suggesting that adding affordable housing and ‘those people’ will lower property values. The evidence is that it does not — fact, because the site will be enormously more valuable, it will generate substantial new real estate taxes, and therefore more local services.

Mr. Doughty added that “companies like Marriott and Disney and Hilton make their investment decisions on what they assume the zoning is going to be.”

Wrong again, Mr. Doughty.

You know full well companies know zoning can be changed — and frequently try to change it themselves.

Anaheim’s mayor, Curt Pringle, who voted against the housing plan, said he understood the frustration that led Disney to file a lawsuit.

Anaheim mayor Curt Pringle, resident for 36 years

Mayor Pringle likes incentives:

In August 2005, the Anaheim city council adopted an ambitious new housing strategic plan, coauthored by Mayor Pringle. The Plan uses market incentives rather than command-and-control policies to sizably increase the affordable housing stock in the City of Anaheim over the next 4 years.

He cites increasing affordable housing development:

The city has recently completed 663 affordable rental units and has another 1,243 under way, according to statistics provided by the mayor.

That’s good — though it falls far short of what Anaheim needs.

“I certainly think they have a legal right to protect their interests,” Mayor Pringle said, adding that “no one contemplated that three members of the City Council would turn their back on that engine [Block that metaphor! -- Ed.] of economic development within the city.”

Mayor Pringle’s statements also make no sense to me. In what way is replacing an existing mobile home park with 1,500 new homes, of which 1,300 will be market-rate, bringing workers into Anaheim, going to undermine economic development?

The controversy began when the SunCal Companies, a developer based in nearby Irvine, signed a contract to buy 26 acres and announced plans to build 1,300 condominiums and 225 rental units on the site.

Frank Elfend, a project manager for SunCal, said the idea for affordable housing came about in consultation with the city. “Whenever you do a big project, you talk to the community about what their needs are,” he said. “In Anaheim, the priority was affordable housing.”

Evidently.

SunCal’s approach won the support of several members of the City Council. In February, the Council approved the project, leading Disney to file its first lawsuit ever against the city.

I will be fascinated to hear on what legal basis Disney believes it can prevent a city from exercising a normal prerogative of local government.

In late April, at the end of a contentious six-hour public hearing, the City Council voted to reaffirm its support for the housing project, ensuring that the litigation would continue. The vote was 3 to 2.

Another reason for the lawsuit suggests itself — to raise the political stakes, in hopes of persuading one of the three stalwart councilors to change his or her mind.

Are you ready for some litigation?

Mayor Pringle, who opposed the new housing, said that Anaheim was building at least as much affordable housing as any other city in Orange County —

Mayor Pringle’s comments suggest he sees affordable housing as a noxious burden to be discharged rather than an asset to his community — a very curious perspective for an elected official.

It all makes sense from my point of view

—and that it would build more when it found appropriate sites.

A 26-acre mobile home park, that can increase its density sixty-fold, isn’t appropriate?

“We like you, but not living here.”

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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Few things are as inextricable from the New England identity as the ubiquitous pink-and-orange of Dunkin’ Donuts shops, so common they’re used for business meetings and cited as landmarks in driving directions.

But not so, apparently, in Wellesley.

The aesthetically minded town –

Journalistic code for ’snobby’ …

– home to the author of ”America the Beautiful” and, according to its website, the nation’s first zoning laws — is in an uproar over a new Dunkin’ Donuts shop that has opened blocks from town center.

If you put in a Dunkin’ Donuts, I’ll break your ankles.

You have to be a New Englander to appreciate the aura of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Every morning, every evening, every subway stop ….

Where I come from, everyone knows that:

1. Their donuts are sinfully tasty. The aroma is hypnotic.

2. They’re ubiquitous. There is a small kiosk literally twenty steps from my office entrance, in case I overlooked the one twenty steps from my subway exit.

3. They’re unbelievably popular (”a license to print money,” says former small business owner Nancy, whose business was adjacent to one). On a typical morning there will be ten to twenty people lined up at my kiosk.

4. They’re down-market. Their customers are, as the good snobs of Wellesley might sniff, ‘not esthetically minded,’ but rather those who work the blue-collar jobs, who buy the starter homes, and who live in the affordable housing.

The Dunkin’ Donut is thus seen by some as the thin end of the wedge, the beginning of the collapse of suburban aristocracy:

In a hamlet where residents can lunch at The Uptown Gourmet [Could a chain's name be any more elitist? -- Ed.] and shop at Comina (”where the world’s finest furnishings and accessories come together”), the town has thrown its bureaucratic weight against the new franchise.

It first tried to convince the owner that he is obligated to seek a town license to continue operating. When he refused, the town took its beef to court, where a judge ruled against it this month [March, 2006 -- Ed.]. Officials are now plotting a new law that could give the town power to shut down the franchise.

Using laws to compel conformity? Charming.

The stakes are considered high. The franchise, in the words of one town official, is ”a barnacle on the face of progress.”

Do these look the same?

The new Wellesley outlet is a somewhat toned-down version of the usual Dunkin’ Donuts look, housed in a red brick building with fresh flowers in the bay window and a black-and-gold wooden sign, instead of the usual lighted one.

Wellesley officials fear that the new Dunkin’ Donuts shop will damage the character of the town center.

Just ghastly, isn’t it?

“My goodness, and I thought Ghostbusters’ Stay-Puf Man was bad.”

An excrescence.

Still, its presence has become a kind of call to arms.

”What this was for us was a huge wake-up call,” said Selectman David J. Himmelberger.

One of the reasons, beyond traffic and parking concerns, town officials say, is that such franchises could damage the town’s character. In one recent effort to preserve that charm, Wellesley forced the developer of a nearby commercial strip to prohibit ”McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Taco Bell, Roy Rogers, Arby’s, Wendy’s, or Hardee’s, or their respective equivalents,” according to an agreement signed by the developer and the town.

Let them in, and their riffraff customers will follow.

In other words, lacking any legitimate grievance against a donut shop, the town instead extorts a concession to which it is logically not entitled by tying it to a discretionary permission:

The town has not banned chains from the town altogether, with a Starbucks, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and Bruegger’s Bagels flourishing on the main drag.

One of these dots is an abomination, says Wellesley.

Like the bigot who likes ’some of your kind,’ Wellesley is perfectly willing to embrace upscale economic immigrants; it’s those slightly dirty downscale types we want to keep out altogether or at the very least out of sight:

There are also other Dunkin’ Donuts franchises, though they are well out of view, in outlying corners of the town, or, in one case, tucked inside a Mobil gas station.

Good thing those people know their place.

The new Dunkin’ Donuts shop was all the more alarming to town officials because it seemed to slip, for a time, below the radar.

What skullduggery. What deceit.

The owner, who declined to speak to the Globe,

“Would you like to go on the record, sir?”

signed a lease late last year for the space when a bakery that sold handmade breads vacated the space, according to town officials and court papers.

Isn’t it just like an upstart to think that replacing one bakery with another requires no permission?

But because the owner never applied for a restaurant license, town officials say they were unaware that the franchise was moving in until they spotted a legal notice in the local paper about plans to convert the space into a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Bakery, good; donut shop, bad!

According to court papers and town officials, the owner is arguing that his shop escapes the town’s definition of a restaurant because it has no seats and therefore needs no license.

“Escapes the town’s definition”?

“I need a what?”

What brilliant camouflage of one’s inherently restaurant character, to have no seats. What will those infiltrators think of next?

“Never should have opened that Dunkin’s in Wellesley.”

Meanwhile, the town sought to impose its redefinition of ‘restaurant’ to mean ‘any food-oriented use we do not like.’

Town officials took the matter to court in February. A Superior Court Judge ruled against the request for an injunction this month, saying licenses are not required for take-out establishments and that another law cited by the town, a requirement that coffee and tea houses not operate without licenses, had not been enforced since its adoption in 1918.

That’s the problem with blatant inconsistency, it’s just so hard to explain plausibly.

Town officials are now pinning their hopes on a piece of legislation they plan to introduce at Town Meeting in coming weeks. If passed, it would require Dunkin’ Donuts and every other existing and future take-out establishment in Wellesley to obtain a restaurant license from the town.

Behold the levers of power being wielded to coerce: instead of adhering to some basic principle of utilization, the town of Wellesley is trying to write a rule that permissibly excludes ‘those businesses’ even as it includes ‘our kind of business.’

Among the citizenry, there are clearly mixed feelings about the new Dunkin’ Donuts shop.

Christine Stirret and her twin sister, Laura, dropped in during a lunch break from nearby Wellesley High School. They are both happy to have a Dunkin’ Donuts. ”People are going to get fast food, even if it’s not in the city,” said Laura. ”It’s kind of nice to have a full Dunkin’ Donuts,” said Christine.

”It’s not as attractive as it should be,” said Maureen Bach, who works at a neighboring dental practice.

Paging the taste police!

Let me see your fashion license.

Stratagems of exclusion such as Wellesley’s clumsy panicked example are frequently unveiled, usually with more suavity, when seeking to exclude affordable housing, masquerading as ‘minimum-lot-size’ or ‘maximum density’ or even ‘planning commission review.’

In biological ecosystems, diversity is an intrinsic measure of health. In the same way, communities need income and cultural diversity. Income diversity supports the local economy; cultural diversity encourages growth in home value and civic polity. Whom do you think works in the Dunkin’ Donuts that serves the coffee you buy?

I suspect that Globe author Donovan Slack smells the rich fulsome aroma of hypocrisy, for he concludes:

[Ms. Bach] opposes the store but nonetheless bought a coffee there on a recent morning.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Make mine a latte to go.”

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