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HomeMy WebLinkAboutLINDIMER SUBDIVISION FINAL - 26 93A - CORRESPONDENCE - CITY HALL (3)Diane Jones 10/25/93 Page 5 an emotional plea from two citizens( which incidentally was full of factual misrepresentations) and that we would probably not be going ahead with our project. I asked Charlie and Suzanne along the way, if they would be so opposed to our project if we were building $200,000 homes instead of starter homes, to which they replied "probably not". When two people out of 150 on the APO list can come so close to denying a project, it is not surprising to me that other developers are not attempting lower end housing. It costs a lot just to get to the meeting, the risks are great, and the brain damage isn't worth it. NIMBY agreements come disguised in many ways. Thank you and Steve for hearing me out. This has been a difficult project for me. Very truly yours, W=s Mark Linder ML:kl Diane Jones 10/25/93 Page 4 So it was one tense meeting with two minutes of hostility in a six month process. This was the "threatened and harassed by the developer" that Suzanne reported to the council at the appeal. I called Kierston the next day and apologized for losing my temper. I take full responsibility for raising my voice, but as I viewed it, the survival of my project was unjustly at stake. Unfortunately, several city.employees got caught in the middle of this. Several days later, I visited with Mark Taylor's boss and again took responsibility for raising the tensions in the meeting. When you have parties with strongly held opposing viewpoints and the City and their development policies caught sometimes in the middle, these frictions can sometimes occur. This is the nature of the process. I think that the planning staff did an excellent job of handling this process. I didn't always hear what I wanted to hear, and neither did Charlie and Suzanne, but a lot of meetings were held and a lot of issues satisfactorily worked out. To summarize, I feel that the planning process worked. Two citizens had tremendous input into an adjacent development proposal and many significant concessions were granted willingly and in good faith by the developer at their request. Throughout the entire process, with the exception of two brief exchanges at one meeting, they were treated respectfully and civilly by myself and by the city staff. The fence that we promised to build before starting any site work is built. Our covenants include everything we said they would and have been approved by the City Attorney. Our development agreement contains the new property owner's disclosure language. We intend to build our homes in a one-year period and be as considerate as we can to Charlie and Suzanne and the Rossborough neighborhood. In my twelve years of doing development projects in Ft. Collins, I have never had a conflict like this with an adjacent owner that I couldn't solve. When one owner can request and achieve a modified site plan, a fence, a landscape buffer, legal protection in covenants and disclosures, a variance to allow a particular siting of a house, and a redesign of a sewer system, none of which were required by the zoning statutes. I just don't see how Suzanne or anyone else can think that the system doesn't work or that citizens have no input. These citizens scoured the system for every possible reason to seek denial and tried to exploit it for any possible personal financial gain. At one point of the process, the Developer said "enough was enough" and barked back. I'm sure they were threatened and intimidated by the thought of a public hearing scrutinizing their business practices. Take your copy of the animal control and nuisance ordinances, go look at their property, and draw your own conclusions. I have not complained to anyone about these things and have no intention of doing so. It is none of my business and the last thing I want is to make it my business. The part of the process that bothers me the most is that a developer can follow all the rules, be as accommodating as he can, and be represented as such by the staff to a public body, and see all of his work vanish in a flash as a citizen gets up and asserts whatever he/she wants, whether truthful or not to a "ready to believe" board or council. I have little doubt that if we had submitted as a PUD instead of as a subdivision, the P & Z board and the City Council would have found differently, insisted on a buffer. in response to Diane Jones 10/25/93 Page 3 their supposed value. We had the P & Z board meeting. At that meeting, Suzanne presented a plan which showed a sewer line going across their property. Previously, at the request of the Wastewater Department, I had specifically asked Suzanne for an easement for the 18" line. She had laughed at me and said "no way". Mark Taylor asked for the July 5th meeting with everyone to clear up any miscommunication that had occurred at the P & Z board meeting and to discuss the future alignment of the 18" line (at Suzanne's request) across their property, since they had apparently reconsidered their "no easements" position. It was a tense meeting. I did not want to be there. I felt that the route Suzanne had indicated at the planning.meeting was just another tactic to increase our development costs, because it was far longer than our approved plan and involved many more manholes and ran right through an outbuilding of theirs. When hearing from.Mark that the easement she had indicated would have to be 30 feet wide because it was not in a street, they quickly said no. Mark then said if they would grant an easement for the 18" line, the Wastewater Department would require that we build it across their property and do a repayment agreement. At that my jaw dropped! This totally threw the ball in their court and would require us (a small project) to front end a very large cost with the possibility of never being repaid since repayment agreements expire after 20 years. Here we sat after getting conceptual approval on our sewer design before purchasing the property, after getting preliminary P & Z board approval, and after having spent thousands of dollars on design fees, being told this. I had to sit there and endure Suzanne's smirks and finger pointing goading gestures, while she tried to convince Charlie to grant the easement. I got mad and did in a very sharp voice tell her that our design was approved and none of her damn business. The tensions really elevated briefly, then settled down and Charlie again said no to any easements. We resumed, concluded that we should investigate other routes for the 18" line and the meeting ended. After the meeting, I did ask Kierston, Charlie, and Suzanne to stay and asked them to drop the appeal. We had just had two engineers (Mark Taylor and Dick Rutherford) tell them that our design was safe, sound, and OK. They refused. I told them that so far, I had been considerate and had made many concessions to them. They had their opportunity at the hearing to present their positions and had lost, and if they insisted on the appeal, it was just going to make me angry. I told them that for them to expand their use like they had mentioned in the meeting (build more buildings), it would require a public meeting and that I would be there and do to them what they had done to me (raise absurd objections). The way that I felt at that moment was that I had been the one who had been harassed throughout the process and that the appeal was groundless and a waste of time. It just seemed to me that they were just out to get financial concessions from a developer, like.they attempted with Kingston Woods. I am sorry, I just lost my temper and couldn't resist striking back. If they truly were in compliance with all laws like they said "we have nothing to hide", what possible threat would a public meeting be? Diane Jones 10/25/93 Page 2 since it does not exist downstream, it could not be used at present and that we could connect into an existing 8" main about 100 feet away in an existing right-of-way in Rossborough. We discussed our services and other issues, and got a verbal conceptual OK that "we can make it work". Suzanne has never understood that our sewer design was sound, not precedent setting (this implies something is wrong with it), perfectly legal, and in compliance with City codes. This was simply her best shot at seeking denial of our project and she turned it into a big confusing deal for her own purposes. Bret and I acquired the property from CSURF, who had been trying to sell the property for eight years. We submitted our plans, had a neighborhood meeting, and had several meetings with Charlie. and Suzanne and various other City staff members. Ted Sheppard handled the early meetings and did an excellent job. Charlie and Suzanne were always treated well (respectfully and courteously) by all City staff personnel. They raised every possible objection to our project. Policy after policy (no, they could not make the make us pay for part of Horsetooth Road costs when their property is developed) and standard after standard were explained to them, with the bottom line being that our project met all of the rules. Their position on our project was made perfectly clear by Charlie at the end of the first planning meeting with Ted, when he said that after I asked him for an easement for a telephone line, he was against our project. It just meant more difficulties (complaints by new neighbors) for him, he wasn't going to give us any easements, and that he was going to do everything he could to make it harder and more expensive for us, hoping we'd just go away. This is just what they did. The planning process worked. Charlie and Suzanne raised many legitimate concerns, which I feel we responded to in responsible fashion. We changed our site plan to have less lots backing onto their property. We agreed to a fence and landscape buffer. We set our fence back, agreed to build it first before any site work, and put protections in our covenants to give their property the legal standing to insure that it stay in place until their property developed. We agreed to give notice in our covenants that people were moving next to a stable with lights, noise, odors, etc. The one thing we did not agree to was a 150 feet setback because it reduced our project from 15 lots to 11 and made us spread almost the same development costs (because the street still had to be extended to their property line as required by the Engineering Transportation and Planning Departments) over significantly less lots resulting in a $5,000 price increase we would have to charge our buyers. Our goal has always been to do as affordable housing as we could on this site. Our first sewer design (joint trench both lines) was just an attempt to be economical and reduce our development costs towards this end. All the commissions and councils in the world can't produce affordable housing. The private sector has to do it. As committed as Charlie and Suzanne are to their livelihood, I am committed to trying to produce inexpensive housing. In my mind, giving them the 150 feet buffer was a big subsidy for the Tidds from our end buyers, which to them, the buyers, was unfair and unnecessary. They had eight years to purchase this property, we paid $30,000 for it, one tenth of Linder Real Estate i Diane Jones Deputy City Manager P.O. Box 580 Ft. Collins, CO 80522 Dear Ms. Jones: October 25, 1993 On October 5th, I met with Steve VanderMeer and had a lengthy discussion of the entire course of events surrounding my Lindimer Subdivision, Charlie Tidd and Suzanne Bassinger. Steve provided me with a copy of Suzanne's letter and now I am writing to clarify the situation and to hopefully put an end to this process. To provide a little background on the situation, I think it might be helpful to start at the beginning. I met Charlie and Suzanne on August 19, 1992 after hearing from a friend that their property was for sale. I called them and set up a meeting. They were, in fact, discussing a sale with Bill Neal, the developer of Kingston Woods and welcomed another party to make an offer. This was a very short meeting. They told me their asking price was $300,000 and I responded that $300,000 was far in excess of market value and left. Also at that meeting, we discussed the four acres to the north of their property, which later became Lindimer Subdivision. They (Suzanne) told me that they "controlled" this property because it could not be developed without a sewer easement through their property, which they wouldn't give unless it was being developed in conjunction with theirs, and also because it's sole point of access was more than 500 feet from a point providing duel access. Suzanne talked of "capturing its value" if someone bought their property. In other words, it was not very valuable by itself since it could not be developed, but if purchased along with their property, it could be acquired inexpensively and combined with theirs and would therefore enhance the value of their property. Later in the process at the neighborhood meeting and in a meeting with Ted Sheppard, Charlie readily acknowledged that they had never purchased this property to buffer theirs because there was never any reason for it. It could not be developed, and since their property was annexed as a nonconforming use, they could never expand their business onto it. I only include this information to explain to you that Charlie and Suzanne have always had an imagined proprietary interest of sorts in this property and their own private motivations for trying to deny our project. I thought no more of this property for several months until a friend, Bret Larimer, came to me and said that he had the. property under contract and wanted to partner it with me. I had never really considered purchasing the property before because of its small size, irregular shape, and other difficulties. We investigated the utilities and were told by the Wastewater Department that the 18" main on the master plan would have to be built, but Specializing in Development Properties 309 W. Harmony Road 0 Fort Collins, Colorado 80526 0 (303) 229-0544