Dorothy Day case drags on
Disputes date back 30 years
DANBURY — The Dorothy Day Hospitality House will continue to serve Danbury’s needy and homeless for the foreseeable future, even as the yearslong battle over the shelter heads back to court this fall.
City zoning officials scuttled a proposed settlement plan last week, sending both city and shelter attorneys back to a Hartford judge to decide whether the Spring Street shelter downtown should be allowed to stay.
But that proceeding will take months — perhaps more than a year — of backand-forth filings with the court before the judge even considers a decision, and the shelter will remain open in the meantime, officials have agreed.
“There has always been a legal discussion about a lot of technicalities, most of which date back over 30 years,” said Joe Simons, a Dorothy Day board member and longtime volunteer. “It really has not impacted us in the past in our ability to serve the people who come to our door and it won’t impact us going forward, either. We’ll continue to remain open, business as usual, until this all gets sorted out.”
The latest fight over the shelter began more than three years ago, when city Zoning Enforcement Officer Sean Hearty issued a cease-and-desist order for the 16-bed shelter behind the food kitchen.
“At the end of the day, I can’t imagine the city of Danbury not having the Dorothy Day house.”
Attorney Neil Marcus
The shelter and its attorney Neil Marcus appealed that decision to the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals, setting off a series of bitter public hearings pitting passionate supporters of the shelter against neighbors upset about the clientele it serves being in the largely residential neighborhood.
The board sided with Hearty and Marcus and appealed it further, where it has been pending with Judge Marshall Berger Jr., who presides over the landuse litigation docket in Hartford.
The case barely budged in the two years since, with the shelter open all the while, with Berger urging the city and shelter to attempt to settle their dispute under local rules, officials said.
The resulting settlement idea sent the controversy back to the Zoning Board of Appeals this summer, where Marcus asked board members to grant a series of highly technical variances that would have given the 120-year-old Dorothy Day building permission not to meet certain modern zoning rules.
That would have allowed the shelter to apply for a special exception to reauthorize the shelter to continue to operate as it has for 35 years.
When the board unanimously denied those variances Thursday night, they closed the door on any possible solution at the city level.
“The ZBA didn’t understand why we were there,” Marcus said. “They even used my language of ‘hall pass’ in denying it. I need a permit from the ZBA to file an application with planning ... That message just didn’t resonate, so basically the ZBA does not favor having this determined locally.”
Board members lamented the decision as a “tough one,” but they argued the variances were not appropriate and would apply to the property in perpetuity, whether the shelter stayed or went.
Hearty declined to comment further on the issue last week, citing the pending litigation, but he and city attorneys have hinted in previous public remarks that Marcus has delayed and prolonged proceedings in an effort to keep the shelter open. But neither are zoning officials pressing to enforce the cease-and-desist order while the case remains under appeal.
Berger has told attorneys on both sides he preferred them to settle the dispute locally, hoping to avoid ruling from Hartford on whether the homeless shelter portion of a decades-old Danbury nonprofit’s operations can continue to operate, attorneys have said.
The attorneys and Berger are expected to meet this fall and a scheduling order will follow, which will outline when each side must submit materials on the case — well into 2019.
“Ultimately, I’d still love to have the Planning Commission say, ‘You can operate that facility, but you have to make this tweak or do that,’ ” Marcus said. “We’re open to all that. But now Judge Berger has to decide this on a narrow issue. At the end of the day, I can’t imagine the city of Danbury not having the Dorothy Day house. They do a fabulous and frankly much-needed service.”