This illustrates the fundamental weakness of our antiquated use-based zoning system, which puts bureaucrats (city staff) and politicians (the council) in charge of deciding what can go into an empty building in downtown instead of the entrepreneur who is risking their neck trying to put something into the dead spot in Olympia.
A brewery, with or without a kitchen, would be a GREAT use for that spot compared to its current emptiness, so our goal should be removing barriers, not trying to enforce some ancient guess about what "uses" we should allow.
We have planned ourselves into insolvency, preferring the "conforming use" of nothing -- dead, empty buildings -- to productive uses that go against our mindset that a central planning bureaucracy is the right way to determine what should go into our downtown.
I'm not against planning if it means keeping the slaughterhouses away from residential areas and such. But we need a real sense of urgency about attacking nonproductive buildings and spaces -- meaning we need to figure out ways to let these projects work, instead of hammering them with the full set of code requirements as a reward for wanting to bring some activity into downtown. Why shouldn't an associated food truck count for compliance, if our code is so dumb as to require a brewery to have food associated with it (as if a brewery wasn't a valuable and honorable use).
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