ADRIAN — Neighbors along the northwest corner of Adrian College feel the university has stopped being a good neighbor these days.
They also feel Adrian city officials could have communicated more that the university plans to propose the construction project to the Planning Commission.
The project, which broke ground May 13, will feature an inflatable dome expected to reach 90 feet in height between the university's baseball stadium and athletics stadium.
“I think our feelings have been expressed to the Planning Commission and the City Commission,” Canterbury Street resident Jill Bakewell said Friday morning. “…We can't stop this. We're still angry and upset about it.”
Adrian College has already begun moving earth through excavation and building what it calls a “state-of-the-art” indoor sports dome.
The indoor turf facility, highlighted in the university's State of the Union address on April 5, will be used by several athletic programs including football, soccer, lacrosse, rugby and track and field, and will be available to the entire Adrian College community. Become.
“With 50 different teams, it's hard to find field space and time,” new Adrian College football coach Joe Palka said in a news release issued April 12 about the State of the University address. “This will not only create more opportunities, but also enhance the success that Adrian is currently enjoying.”
Palka said Adrian College differentiates itself from its competitors with the Athletic Dome and is building a “great recruiting tool.”
Not everyone shares the university's enthusiasm for the dome.
Residents who live in the university's neighborhoods, including Canterbury Street, Renfrew Avenue, Inverness Drive, Shrewsbury Avenue and Stratford Avenue, were told during Adrian City Commission and Planning Commission meetings back in early April. He expressed his dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction and concern about the dome.
They cited concerns, including the city and university's lack of transparency and communication in notifying residents about the project, the dome's potential impact on property values, water runoff and soil erosion, and all sorts of other things. posed a huge list of. Property damage that residents may deal with if the basement floods in a storm, noise ordinance violations, increased light pollution and traffic, and the planned use of the dome.
Tim Bakewell said at the May 7 Planning Commission meeting that instead of expressing anger or frustration, the city would do “the bare minimum,” such as informing neighbors about the dome plan. He said he could have done more.
“You must strive for transparency so that the public knows what is going on and whether they are fairly represented,” he said.
The Bakewell family has lived in the Canterbury Road mansion for 38 years. There they raised their children. Jill said the house had been in the family for at least 60 years.
“I should have been given the opportunity to ask questions and voice concerns about the Adrian College dome construction before a project this big was passed. “It doesn't matter how it's compartmentalized, the culture of secrecy needs to change,” she said. “All we're asking is for our questions to be answered.”
The Bakewells are among a group of residents who are persistently searching for answers regarding the dome, asking planning commission members and city commissioners for comment, as well as contacting Adrian College directly and trying to set up a meeting with the university. I'm doing it. project engineers. Gill said such a meeting with Adrian College is scheduled for this week.
“I hope there are big lessons to be learned from this,” she said. “This not only affects our property values, but it also affects our quality of life. We'll either have to move or put up with dome views for the rest of our lives.” .”
Residents said they felt “betrayed” by both the city government and Adrian College over decisions made regarding the sports dome. But they will work together to ensure this never happens again.
Dome site plan approval
March 12 was the day of the special meeting where the Planning Commission considered the proposed indoor practice facility and gave it its stamp of approval. On February 23, the city posted a legal notice regarding the meeting in the advertising section of the Daily Telegram. The notice mentioned the bank's drive-through project, but not the university's.
Adrian City Administrator Greg Elliott said May 6 that mailing notices to residents would be costly. Much of the Department of Community Development's budget is devoted to postage costs for mailing notices when necessary. The City Commission recently ordered Elliott to produce weekly email updates for administrators that people can subscribe to for free. Each Friday update includes information about city happenings and items submitted to city agencies.
Notice of the Planning Commission's March 12 special meeting was included in Elliott's March 8 administrator update. His second update on the outcome of the Planning Commission meeting was included in a March 15 email update. In both cases, Elliott referred to the dome as an indoor practice facility. His March 15 update provided some clarity that the practice facility is an “inflatable dome.”
“How much is enough to ask?” Elliot said. “(The city) has the budget and should do what it has to do, but it costs more money and we don't have more money. We will do what we need to do in terms of notifications.”
Because Adrian College submitted the site plan to the Planning Commission for consideration, there was no need for the City Commission, Adrian College's highest legislative body, to consider the proposal.
Elliott said site planning is generally administrative and procedural in nature. It does not need to be reviewed by the City Commission.
“This is a university building located in the ERO area. Therefore, it is allowed by right,” he said.
In addition to having no height restrictions, ERO districts also have no landscaping requirements. For now, local residents near the college campus where the dome is being built imagine a view of the dome from virtually their backyards.
Jill Bakewell's brother, an architect from Birmingham, Michigan, created several renderings of what a nearby dome might look like. Bakewell said in an email that the dome was drawn to scale with a computer program called Sketchup. Similarly, the house is placed in a “Sketch Up” model and drawn approximately to scale based on Google Earth imagery.
“Are they proving anything? No, it just helps visually convey what we're going to see,” said Canterbury Street resident Tim Oldshouse.
All other zoning areas throughout Adrian have height restrictions and landscaping requirements. The city is currently working on a complete rewrite of its city planning ordinance. The city said that attention will be paid to the ERO area in relation to dimensional requirements.
“Every time the ERO district has been written, it has been written that way,” Elliott said. “All the Planning Commission could do was apply the rules of the zoning ordinance for real estate in the ERO district.
“…It was a compliant site plan and really needed to be approved.”
Due to a technical error on the city's part, the Planning Commission's March 12 special meeting was not recorded and the record of the meeting is unknown, Elliott said during the City Commission's May 6 regular meeting. I made it. Meeting minutes are posted on the city's website adriancity.com.
Planning Committee Chairman: The project was not an “arbitrary decision”
The May 7 Planning Commission meeting was the last time residents lobbied the city during a public meeting regarding the dome.
After hearing from the Bakewells, Sue Allhouse and Tim Allhouse, Planning Commission Chairman Mike Jacobitz expressed his gratitude to the residents who shared their information. , also expressed empathy for their situation.
“If this was my neighborhood, I would feel the same way you do,” Jacobitz told Jill Bakewell at the May 7 meeting. “I'm sorry. I would feel the same way. However, in this particular case, the die is cast. This was not an arbitrary decision. This was the site plan.”
Similar to Elliott's explanation of site planning, Jacobitz explained that the planning commission's only responsibility and only measurement tool is to compare the project proposal against a set of standards, a set of rules and regulations.
If a site plan meets those regulations, “we have very little discretion as to whether or not to approve it,” he said.
“If it meets the regulations, we have an obligation to approve it,” he said. “In this particular case, that was indeed the case.”
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The role of the Adrian Planning Commission is to establish and enforce regulations regarding the use of private and public lands.
“We're trying to be solution-oriented right now. We're still angry,” Sue Oldshouse said at the May 7 Planning Commission meeting. “I don’t know how I let it go.
“…We want what's best for our community, but we don't want it to come at the expense of our livelihoods,” she said.
— Contact reporter Brad Heineman at bheineman@lenconnect.com or follow him on X (formerly Twitter). twitter.com/Lenawiheineman.
