Wednesday brought another setback for a $35 million combined high rise apartment building and Martin’s Super Market proposed for South Bend’s East Bank Neighborhood.

In this case, the third time was not a charm as those behind the Commerce Center project again sought permission to exceed the East Bank neighborhood’s building height limit—and failed.

That, despite the fact that the proposed building height this time was only nine stories—compared to the 12 stories rejected the first two times out. (The St. Joseph County Plan Commission gave the project no recommendation in September of 2016 while the South Bend Common Council voted down 5-4 a proposed 12 story building in December of last year).

Today’s vote by the St. Joseph County Board of Zoning Appeals wasn’t even close: 4 to 1 to deny a height variance.

“So I think it’s really unfortunate that a body this seemingly out of touch with what really a vast majority of folks that we’re hearing from really, really believe about this structure,” said Brian Pawlowski, Interim Director of South Bend’s Community Investment Department.

While the easiest way to rescue the project slipped away today, officials contend they can still do it the hard way.

“Definitely life left in it, full of life, I won’t get too cliché on you but we have a couple other options we can look at now. One would be a text amendment the common council could potentially adopt which would overall change the height and only the height potentially for one designated area or another and then another route could potentially be an overall revision of the planning process. The challenge with that second route is that it takes a substantially longer amount of time, anywhere from at the most optimistic I think, three months, and to the longer end up to nine or even greater,” Pawlowski said.

Judging from comments made by members, the BZA seemed to feel uncomfortable with the request.

The board basically exists to enforce the zoning rules as written, in this case it was being asked to re-write those rules.

“Disappointed but we are still going to keep trying. We're still going to forge through because we believe that this is what's right for South Bend and that is needed for our downtown, and so that's what we believe in and we’ll figure out how to get it done,” said Velvet Canada with Matthews, LLC.