06/20/2000 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes of 6/20/2000 developer who could put in multi-family housing, apartment buildings, cluster homes or whatever. He would rather see the city own the property. The property value will increase. You just can't make any more land. • JoAnn Sheridan, 5560 Barton Woods, thanked Councilman Gareau for his support and the other Council members who will vote against the purchase. Traffic for ballgames is unreal--there is no parking for all the soccer people. It is not a safe situation for children. No one is saying that soccer is not great, but safety of the children should be the main concern. They know, even if this passes, Council does not always make the best decisions. There are many blunders in North Olmsted, and some of them already have been discussed. There are no guarantees for green spaces. She told the Mayor he could not guarantee that there will be green spaces. He can take the land and do anything he wants with it--if it was all green space, they would support him. "Together we can make adifference,"--they (residents in Barton Woods) were the last people to know about this and the Service Director lives right next door to him. They have been asking him for a year what was happening. They are the last people to know, and the Mayor wants them to put their confidence in him that he is going to give them green spaces. She cannot put her confidence in him because she doesn't think he started out right and doesn't think he approached the people right. Together we could make a difference, but she hasn't seen the "together" on his side. • Mayor Musial said, if the city buys that property as green space, it is impossible for himself to unilaterally cause that to be something else. The change would have to be '"~ approved by members of Council. This is the checks and balances that we have in our type of government organization. One does not do it alone, one has to have cooperation ftom others to do that. • Mr. Limpert said he could appreciate Mrs. Sheridan's concerns. He has seen this scenario played out time and time again where the residents come forward concerned about one thing and are often successful to stop it, only to find out something worse comes along. There was a development on the east end of town that was proposed to be storage units. The residents were up in arms. It was stopped, and instead they got a bar that is playing music until 2:30 a.m. The Wal-Mart situation, the main complaint that people had was 90,000 square feet of retail space was too much for that property and they did not want the traffic. They succeeded, they stopped it. They got 160,000 square feet, and the traffic that a grocery store draws. Mrs. Sheridan, in her letter, was concerned about development using Barton Woods private roads. As he understands it, Barton Woods abuts part of this property which is landlocked unless other property is bought out onto Barton Road. It is zoned multi- family which, if developed, will use their roads. If the city purchases the property and uses it for active or passive green space, there is no need to use the road and it would be silly to bring traffic through a condo association. The other concern that comes to mind, there are several Council members who are, perhaps legitimately complaining, that they are not getting enough details. But the devil is in the details. Every detail that has been provided has been, as a possible detail, has then been exaggerated and used for a reason why not to develop it. For example, the complaint ''~' earlier was that more parking is needed in that area. So, it is possible that we could 15 ~, ..,..,-.,. ~~.~a~w.~..*. ,..,.,.~~~..,pn~~..~ mow,