City: No new self-storage facilities

Margate will not allow new self storage facilities to open in the city.

At a City Commission workshop, staff suggested the city could redo its law to confine any new such facility to its industrial zone, but officials weren’t for that. “We have nine in nine square miles,” said Vice Mayor Arlene Schwartz. “I think we have enough.”

Fellow officials, who were upset by the mushrooming of such facilities in the city over the last couple of years, agreed.

The decision to ban new storage facilities comes after the city commission extended, earlier this year, a moratorium that was originally introduced in November last year. The city’s move followed it receiving a number of special exceptions applications for such facilities.

“I don’t want people move into Coral Springs and Parkland and dump their stuff in Margate,” Commissioner Anthony Caggiano said at the time the city extended its moratorium. “We should be a place where people and business move in, not a storage place for other cities. I don’t ever want to see another of these things in our city. We have too many of them right now.”

The city commission also decided to lift the existing moratorium on massage parlors in the city. From now on, any new such facility will require a special exception application, with the city commission being the deciding authority.

The decision to impose a moratorium on new massage parlors had come in the wake of complaints of unsavory activities in some of the facilities. Many of the massage parlors in the city have blacked out windows; the city commission has recently asked staff to change the city’s law to make it illegal for such facilities to have blacked out windows.

asivasankaran@sun- sentinel.com