Franklin Township, PA Animal Ordinances: Veterinary Clinic Zoning (2026)

Franklin Township zones only one district, the C Commercial District along Route 896, to accommodate a veterinary hospital, and even there the use is not permitted by right. Section 27-1002, Use Regulations, lists 'Veterinary hospital' under Subsection 3, Conditional Use, in the same category as a gasoline service station, hotel/motel, winery, and a micro-brewery capped at 75,000 barrels annually. The Commercial District's by-right list in Subsection 1 covers specialty stores, a supermarket, medical or dental clinics, and similar retail and service uses, but veterinary hospital is conspicuously absent from it: an applicant cannot simply pull a zoning permit and open one.

A conditional-use application goes to the Board of Supervisors, not the Zoning Hearing Board, under the Commercial District's own use table; the Board evaluates it against the district's stated purpose in § 27-1001, which is to serve the day-to-day retail and service needs of Township residents around the Commercial District's Route 896 frontage. Because the use appears nowhere in the Agricultural-Residential, LDR, MDR, HDR, Village, or TND district use lists in the file, a veterinary practice proposed outside the Commercial District has no zoning path at all under this Code, conditional or otherwise. The Commercial District's height limit of 35 feet (three stories) and its area-and-bulk table, which sets a 30,000-square-foot minimum nonresidential lot on individual sewer, apply to whatever veterinary-hospital building the Board ultimately approves.