06/20/2000 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes of 6/20/2000 property and the Chestnut property. Nobody explored them, but the property is still there and there is room there. He wishes to differ with the Mayor's adjectives in describing the other green space areas. Lastly, in the process of creating this, (the map) what can be seen are green lines--1,500 acres that lie within the city. Bradley Woods, almost 400 acres, is within the city. He talked to the Parks Dept. and they are ready to talk about it. We have fish in three lakes there. There are lakes and rivers and room for ball diamonds at the bottom of Cedar Point Road hill. We have plenty of opportunity for green space. For 10 years, he was a real estate broker and appraiser and believes this property is not adequate and will never serve our needs. The city would pay $32,000 a year for a piece of property when the money could be spent on other places (pointed to areas on the map) to build baseball diamonds today and to build tennis courts today--not in 10 years. Mayor Musial said he did not disagree that there are a number of large areas in the city that one could construe as green space or open space. He thinks that is great. His point is, 20 to 25 years from now, we are going to be scraping for as much green space as we can get. If this property is sold by the Farvers to someone else for limited industry purposes, we will not be able to add that to our total green space. • Bob Koeth, 5530 Bradley Road, is a member of the Planning Commission and lives just down the street from the area being discussed. More commercial space is not what the city needs, whether it be light industry or apartments on Barton or Bradley Road. It takes him five minutes to get out of his driveway every morning. One reason he moved over to Bradley was the anticipation of Crocker/Steams taking the traffic off of Bradley. Now, by adding light industry or condos or apartments, it will just add more. He doesn't want it--there are cars stacked up morning and night. He wants the industry kept to Lorain Road. We should buy every piece of the green space. We are not planning for the next five years--city needs to take a look at this. The Rec Commission is crying for more space. The soccer people are getting a bad rap. He feels the city should just have green space first and maybe sports fields in the future. There are more young people moving in to the city which means more need for recreation space. We need to find more green spaces. He agrees that the property is going to turn commercial and someone is going to put a building on there. Once one industry comes in, others will follow. Because of the historical significance, the house on that property could be saved and used as a meeting place. He doesn't want industry in his neighborhood. • Councilman Gareau said this is not going to be turned into a green space issue. His concern is that you have to evaluate what green space is out there. You have to give consideration as to what green space you would like to acquire first based upon the possibility that it may be gone quicker than others. You have to give consideration to what it is going to cost. Where can you get more for your dollar? These are things that Council has to consider before they say there's green space and we have to buy it before it's gone. His vote will be based upon the fact that nobody has every bothered to tell him any of those things. The Mayor has said it is too speculative to say what it is going to cost 25 years from now. Then tell him what it is going to cost right now, and he will have a good rule of thumb to determine what it will be 25 years out. He doesn't have any indication of what it is going to cost to do the project, such as 10