NORTH WHITEHALL TWP., Pa. — North Whitehall Township supervisors on Wednesday rejected a challenge to zoning rules, finding a township ban on at-home auto repair businesses is constitutional.
The ruling is not the end of a legal fight over whether township resident Gene Weierbach can continue operating a long-running car repair business out of his home on Woodbine Street.
“The township's basis for the existing ordinance is purely hypothetical. You can't think or speak in hypotheticals when you're addressing the constitutionality of an ordinance or a law. You must deal in facts.”Institute for Justice lead attorney Ari Bargil
Township officials ordered Weierbach to cease operations in 2023 after a zoning investigation initiated by township Supervisor Dennis Klusaritz, witnesses testified Wednesday.
Klusaritz recused himself from this week’s hearings.
Weierbach filed a challenge in August contending that township zoning rules banning at-home car repair businesses run afoul of constitutional guarantees of substantive due process and equal protection.
Attorneys from nonprofit law firm the Institute for Justice handling the challenge argued the measure is not actually protecting anyone from Weierbacher’s harmless business.
As a result, lead attorney Ari Bargil said, the government has no good reason to deprive Weierbach of the use of his property — which is unconstitutional, he argued.
“The township's basis for the existing ordinance is purely hypothetical,” Bargil said. “You can't think or speak in hypotheticals when you're addressing the constitutionality of an ordinance or a law. You must deal in facts.”
Current zoning rules also regulate at-home auto repair more harshly than similar or more impactful uses in the same conservation residential zone, Weierbach’s attorneys told the supervisors.
That amounts to unconstitutional discrimination, they said.
'We're just laymen'
Township supervisors Al Geosits and Ronald Heintzelman rejected those claims Wednesday night, following more than nine hours of hearings.
Before testimony began, the two remaining supervisors threw out a third accusation that officials enforced zoning rules unevenly and unfairly, holding it was not relevant to their challenge of the zoning ordinance.
Supervisors also voted against a proposed amendment, submitted as part of the Weierbachs’ challenge, that would have allowed virtually any at-home business as long as it does not affect neighboring properties.
The board members, acting in a role akin to judges in a courtroom, often struggled with in-the-weeds legal decisions they had to make, such as ruling on attorneys’ objections to certain testimony.
“We're just laymen,” Geosits said before rendering a verdict Wednesday. “It's hard for me to wrap my head around whether our ordinance is constitutional or not constitutional.
"But I have to rely on our professional consultants who draft it and the attorneys — our solicitor — who use it.”
'The answer ... is yes'
Throughout the proceedings, Weierbach’s attorneys said their efforts were focused on an eventual appeal to Lehigh County Court, and potentially to higher courts.
“The next place that this will go is up to the Court of Common Pleas, on an appeal, we anticipate,” said Daniel Woislaw, another Institute for Justice attorney working on Weierbach’s case.
“There's no evidence… that Mr. Weierbach’s use is anything other than innocuous. But just because it's an innocuous commercial use does not mean that it must be permitted in a residential zoning district.”North Whitehall Township solicitor Matthew Deschler
A final decision on whether to mount an appeal has to wait until North Whitehall issues a formal written ruling later this year, Woislaw said.
Across three days of testimony, several of Weierbach’s neighbors said they never noticed any noise, chemical spills, excess traffic or other issues on the family’s 16-acre property.
Several said they would never even know he operated an auto repair business if they hadn’t been told.
Township officials agreed that they never saw any issues or received complaints of harm to neighbors, including from Klusaritz.
However, current zoning rules do not distinguish between at-home commercial auto shops that harm neighbors and those that do not — the use is banned outright in residential zones.
“Can a municipality totally preclude commercial uses from residential zoning districts? The answer, whether people like it or not, is yes,” township solicitor Matthew Deschler said.
“There's no evidence… that Mr. Weierbach’s use is anything other than innocuous. But just because it's an innocuous commercial use does not mean that it must be permitted in a residential zoning district.”
Klusaritz originally was called to testify during the hearings, but supervisors determined Monday he could be dismissed.
