(A) The Board of Adjustment shall have the following powers:
(1) To hear and decide appeals where it is alleged by the applicant that there is an error in any order, requirement, decision, or refusal made by an administrative official or agency based on or made in the enforcement of any zoning regulation or any regulation relating to the location or soundness or structures;
(2) To hear and decide, in accordance with the provisions of any regulation, requests for interpretation of any map, or for decisions upon other special questions upon which the Board is authorized by any such regulation to pass; and
(3) Where by reason of exceptional narrowness, shallowness, or shape of a specific piece of property at the time of their enactment of the regulation, or by reason of exceptional topographic conditions or other extraordinary and exceptional situation or condition of the piece of property, the strict application of any enacted regulation under this act would result in peculiar and exceptional practical difficulties to, or exceptional and undue hardships upon the owner of the property, to authorize, upon an appeal relating to the property, a variance from the strict application so as to relieve the difficulties or hardship, if the relief may be granted without substantial detriment to the public good and without substantially impairing the intent of any resolution, but no such variance shall be authorized unless the Board of Adjustment finds that: the strict application of the resolution would produce undue hardship; the hardship is not shared generally by other properties in the same zoning district and the same vicinity; the authorization of the variance will not be of substantial detriment to adjacent property and the character of the district will not be changed by the granting of the variance; and the granting of the variance is based upon reasons of demonstrable and exceptional hardship as distinguished from variations for purposes of convenience, profit or caprice.
(B) No variance shall be authorized unless the Board finds that the condition or situation of the property concerned or the intended use of the property is not of so general or recurring a nature as to make a reasonable practicable the formulation of a general regulation to be adopted as an amendment to the resolution.
(C) In exercising the above mentioned powers, the Board may, in conformity with the provisions of this act, reverse, or affirm, wholly or part, or may modify the order, requirement, decision, or determination appealed from and may make the order, requirement, decision, or determination as shall be proper, and to that end shall have the power of the officer or agency from whom the appeal is taken. The concurring vote of two-thirds of the members of the Board shall be necessary to reverse any order, requirement, decision, or determination of any such administrative official, or to decide in favor of the applicant on any matter upon which it is required to pass under any such resolution or to effect any variation in the resolution.
(Ord. passed - -2000)