Has anyone dealt with a histroic area before?

[Chris G.]

We have retail store from on a block in the historic district. Currently have 3 tenants in 3 shops there with a sidewalk awning that attaches to the building. The awning is quite old and technically "historic" we we're receiving complaints from shoppers as well as the tenants regarding the awning. Mainly saying it looked dangerous and unsafe from the wood being old and sheet metal warped due to weather. Nothing ever fell or came off even in bad storms it was mainly how it looked. Most large vendors would only replace the whole thing and not do maintenance which was way more then we we're looking to pay $10k-15k bids. Eventually the town told us we could replace "wood for wood" and it would be considered repair and maintenance. So recently we got a small vendor we use a lot that's very good at wood repair and roofs to go work on replacing the cracked and rotten wood. In order to replace the wood we had to remove the sheet metal and as soon as that happened the town shut us down saying we weren't doing maintenance we we're rebuilding it and need historic approval. Now I feel there is a fine line on their definition of replacing wood for wood because we we're doing that but in a larger scale and not just 1-2 pieces but it would still have the same appearance. So now it's half taken apart and there's a large fall festival in the town next week. The city won't approve our written application until the next meeting which is the end of November. I'm assuming we're kinda stuck at this point but has anyone else dealt with something similar.