NorthWest Carrollton

The following speech was read at the May 3rd City Council Meeting when the Accessory Parking Lot, CPC Report and BZA decision was endorsed by City Council. All Carrollton & New Orleans residents should be aware of what is taking place on this corner. Anyone interested in contacting our Council Representative, Shelley Midura, regarding this issue can contact her via Email at smidura@cityofno.com or via phone at 658-1010.

The board of NorthWest Carrollton would like to respectfully request that this matter be deferred until the next City Council meeting.

We want to believe that our issues and concerns can be addressed in a civil and organized fashion and be successfully resolved. Marc Robert has everything he needs to go ahead with the construction of his grocery store. This parking lot issue can be resolved as the primary development progresses. We are not attempting to “hold up construction” of the grocery store and resent the implication by Council Member Midura’s staff that this is the case. We have been consistently told that the grocery store and the parking lot were 2 SEPARATE issues. Now the implication is that one can not proceed without the other. Which is true?

We are simply working citizens who have repeatedly taken time off from their jobs to attend City Council meetings, CPC meetings and to meet separately with CPC and our Council member. We have been put through the grinder of city practices and protocols without the aid of the legal representation developers can afford and with very little assistance from anyone in city government on how to manage this maze. We have asked that the entire site plan for Roberts & Walgreens be developed holistically. It the fall of 2006 this it was even announced in the newspaper that would be the case. Yet there was a separate CPC processes for the primary Roberts development. The accessory parking lot at issue today was handled as multi-phase and convoluted conditional use grant, the CPC process and now this Council process. Walgreens has been handled separately because they agreed, under duress, to follow city ordinances. This is not the definition I have of holistic development.

1) More than a year ago during the many meetings and discussions held regarding the Roberts & Walgreens development we told Council Member Midura and Marc Robert that we were opposed to the conversion of residential property to commercial.

2) In the fall of 2006 Council Member Midura introduced a “Conditional Use” for this property “as an accessory parking lot”. The accessory parking was to be for employees only. This was done with out any discussions or notice to the citizens who had repeatedly communicated concerns over the intrusion of commercial space into the neighborhood, When the conditional use issue was first introduced we asked what we could do next. We were told “Nothing, it is done”. This was not completely true. It turned out that there was a CPC process. But even after the CPC process, what we were told yesterday makes it look like there really was nothing we could do to influence the process. Should ordinary citizens need lawyers to allow them to interact with the city government we elect and pay for?

3) In August of 2006, When the “compromise” was announced and Walgreens agreed, under duress, to follow the city’s zoning laws, a “design review board” was created. Never once, before yesterday evening, was any mention made of using this space as a storage facility. This design review board has not met consistently and has not addressed the concerns of the residents. It has only enabled the developers. It has been essentially a farce. We have only been asked what color lipstick we want on the pig. Although I’ll agree it appears that for the Walgreens & Roberts primary development it appears to be nice lipstick.

4) When the provisos were being worked for Roberts primary development we repeatedly told CPC that the citizens of the neighborhood were more inclined to grant Roberts waivers on the number of parking spaces required than to have this residential space used as a parking lot. We also indicated this at the meetings held during the initial Walgreens & Roberts placement discussions. This does not ever seem to have been an option.

5) At the April 10 CPC hearing on this issue there were a number of provisos attached to the use of this site as a parking lot. The space, that we are now being told will house a large storage facility, was referred to as green space. CPC report even goes so far as to recommend that this remaining green space be offered to the residential property owners impacted by the creation of a parking lot. No mention is made of a storage facility.

6) Immediately after April 10th CPC hearing we met with CPC and reviewed our remaining concerns over the accessory parking lot with them. We were told that these concerns were “minor” and could be addressed by Council Member Midura. We wanted this to be the case. We arranged a meeting with Council Member Midura last week. When we advised Ms Midura that the parking lot was to be used for both employee and customer parking, she indicated surprise. When we expressed our concerns regarding appropriate fencing and security on the “green space” no mention was made of a storage facility. We have repeatedly asked CPC, Ms Midura, Marc Robert, the design review committee to ensure that after hours this parking lot would be free of cars and secured. On Tuesday, because we had heard nothing from Council Member Midura regarding our concerns we respectfully requested that this matter be deferred. Yesterday in an afternoon phone call from Ms Midura’s staff one of our board members was told that the matter would not be deferred, our concerns were not going to be addressed in advance of this meeting and to add insult to injury that a storage facility, one not mentioned in any CPC report or to the design review committee, was to be built on the site

Given that, during our meeting with Ms Midura last week, we asked and she indicated it was possible to add an amendment which would cause the entire property under discussion today to be remideated back to green space should the Robert development prove non-viable; the last minute revelation of a storage shed was a bit of a shock. We want a grocery store. We do not want the intrusion of commercial space into the heart of a residential block. The space that we are now told will house a storage facility plunges like a knife into the middle of a residential block and abuts 5 residential properties. There are too many unresolved issues to charge ahead.

So again we respectfully request that this matter be deferred until the next City Council meeting. Council Member Midura was sent Emails this morning from the president of Central Carrollton Association and member of the design review board supporting our request and concerns. Ms Midura was also sent support from Claiborne-University.

I would also request that this Council cause CPC to issue a revised report including the revelations uncovered yesterday regarding use of the “green space” for a storage facility and this revised report be reviewed at CPC meeting before this issue comes before City Council. We want to believe that the CPC was sold a “pig in a poke” and may not have recommended for approval of the conditional use if they had known that the green space which abuts 5 residential properties would not stay green. We would prefer not to have to put lipstick on yet another pig.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 8:32 am by Nola J and is filed under City Council, Commercial Development, PostK Development, Walgreens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.