PA Commonwealth Court strikes down ordinance that reduced parking requirement

I thought this was worth a heads-up to folks in this forum.

TL;DR: the PA Commonwealth Court struck down a local borough ordinance that reduce parking minimums within a local business district, on the grounds that it "arbitrarily and unconstitutionally denies equal protection under the law."

Court Opinion: https://www.pacourts.us/assets/opinions/Commonwealth/out/201CD24_11-6-24.pdf?cb=1

Backstory

I'm on the local planning commission in the Borough of Oakmont, PA (my background is in planning though I left professional practice a decade ago). A couple years ago, Council came to us after noting a number of redevelopment proposals were stalled (never made it past the initial application) or blocked (trying to get a variance through zoning hearing board) due to the parking requirements being triggered, and asked us what changes to the ordinance could be made to accommodate what seemed like common-sense proposals. Despite being a small town with an 19th century street grid (and the small, walkable development pattern that comes with that), and a comprehensive plan touting walkability as important, the 2011 zoning ordinance has the kinds of parking ratios that you'd expect in a greenfield exurb.

We looked at resources from Strong Towns, CNU, APA, and the ULI on the topic. While council and other members were hesitant to look at a full on removal of parking minimums, they were willing to look at the availability of public on-street parking within the vicinity as a means to meeting the existing ratios. So, if say, a proposal required 20 spaces, if those 20 spaces could be found within 300 feet of the parcel on-street within the Commercial zone, they could count. 300 ft is about the average block length on the main street. I informally counted on-street spaces (using imagery from Nearmap) to get a sense of what was available and we used those maps in various discussions.

The ordinance as passed is here:

• Parking Requirement https://ecode360.com/45620335#29789023 
• As it relates to Conditional Use https://ecode360.com/45621281 

A specific individual in town (the appellant behind the all appellants in the opinion linked above) took issue with the proposal. Suffice to say, there is a long history with that individual and the borough; the opinion consequently notes four of five issues that are largely procedural in nature (and if anything they give you a sense of the lengths someone might be willing to go to stop this sort of proposal). The last one, though, which gets to the equal protection conclusion, is maybe relevant to others going down this path. Its conclusions make me worried for similar efforts in other small towns in the commonwealth.

What's frustrating about seeing this happen is that in the 1+ year since this ordinance has been on the books, we've actually seen two highly-visible, long-vacant historic buildings renovated and adapted to new uses. Both projects had been stuck on parking requirements before. I don't think there is anyone in town who thinks those buildings are better off as vacant.

But here we are, and I'm not sure where this goes from here.