The rules are the rules. 

That was the stern lecture the Smithfield Planning Commission gave a struggling restaurant last month before reluctantly agreeing to waive one requirement and grant a two-year extension on another that might well have caused the business to close its doors.

“When are we going to put our foot down to say you’ve got to come into full compliance with what the ordinances are?” Planning Commissioner Thomas Pope asked rhetorically during the commission’s nearly hour-long grilling of Tim Ryan, one of the owners of Red Point Taphouse, an excellent recent addition to Smithfield’s dining scene.

If town leaders are going to be so hard on small businesses, we wish they’d take a similar stance with developers of huge residential and mixed-use projects who routinely seek – and receive – a laundry list of exemptions from town zoning ordinances. Rather than “put our foot down,” the message is much closer to “do as you please.”

Interested citizens should watch the video recording of the Planning Commission’s treatment of Ryan, then go back and watch the meetings where developers John Napolitano and Joseph Luter IV sought far more exceptions to the town’s rules. The difference in tone is striking.

Small businesses, the backbone of this community’s economy, deserve some breaks from the rules, not the out-of-town developers with much deeper pockets.       

Commissioner Randy Pack’s reasonable plea for “small-business-friendly” decision-making with “room for reasonable exception applied fairly and earnestly” was unpersuasive to his colleagues, especially Pope.

“They knew that they had certain parameters to meet; we’re asking them to meet them, and now they don’t want to meet them even though they knew this was part of the business plan prior to starting the business. So, that’s the devil’s advocate in this,” Pope said.

The Planning Commission will soon get another chance to enforce the town’s rules, this time with a Suffolk developer who wants seven special use permits and a Planning Commission waiver for his “Cottages at Battery” development behind Royal Farms on South Church Street.

Already, Brian Mullins has benefited from a text amendment to the town’s zoning ordinance over the strong objections of Planning Commissioner Charles Bryan, who correctly called it a “slippery slope” during a time when the town needs to be controlling residential development, not greasing the skids for those peddling more.

Mullins’ application seeks exemptions ranging from 17 feet between units instead of the required 24 feet to a density of 10 units per developable acre, up from the zoning ordinance’s eight-unit-per-acre maximum.

The Planning Commission’s actions on Cottages at Battery will tell us much about whether “the rules are the rules” is a standard selectively applied to homegrown businesses while large-scale development continues unchecked.