Life goes on after NIMBY battles

CEDAR RAPIDS — Ken Bump knows a thing or two about being on the losing end of a neighborhood battle.

The sky doesn't fall, the 82-year-old retiree and Korean War veteran said at his cozy home in a still-quiet neighborhood tucked off Blairs Ferry Road NE and now across a narrow residential street from a SuperTarget store.

Back in 2000 and 2001, Bump led a neighborhood charge to prevent Target from building the store at 1030 Blairs Ferry Rd. NE in a sweet-corn field where Bump loved to shoot pheasants.

Bump, who lives on Suburban Street NE, said he was sure the new store would destroy his neighborhood's serenity, and he and his neighbors nearly got their way. Twice, the City Planning Commission recommended against the Target plan. But eventually the City Council agreed to it, on a 3-2 vote.

Fourteen years later, Bump is a SuperTarget customer and has come to know store employees, including the produce manager and 'the girls' behind the deli counter.

'It's got a great deli,' he said.

These not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, battles between neighbors and neighborhood intruders are among the most combustible of disputes that confront local elected and appointed officials on a regular basis in any jurisdiction.

Cedar Rapids City Council member Pat Shey said those on the council do make decisions on what gets built where, and 'for better or worse,' property-tax revenue is the city's primary revenue source, he said.

'I don't think we're slaves to property taxes, but we are interested in smart growth,' said Shey, a member of the council's Development Committee.

For his part, Clark Rieke can only hope he can say the same as Ken Bump a decade from now.

Rieke did battle last summer and fall when he and other members of the Mound View neighborhood tried without success to convince the Mission of Hope and its free-lunch program for the poor not to move into a church in the neighborhood at 1700 B Ave. NE.

'There are two kinds of cities — the kind that cares about their core neighborhoods and doesn't zone free meal programs in residential neighborhoods, and the kind that allows those programs there,' said Rieke, a retired Realtor and real estate appraiser and unsuccessful City Council candidate in 2013.

The mission quietly has built a two-month track record at its new neighborhood location.

'I'm here to make lemonade out of lemons,' said Rieke, who now eats at the Mission once a week, as a good neighbor, and attends a church service there once a month.

'A Parade of Horribles'

Council member Shey, who has been on the council since 2006, said some development squabbles are easier to figure out than others.

For example, he was among council members who quickly voiced objections in October to a proposal floated in early form by Wal-Mart to build a new store at Mount Vernon Road SE and East Post Road SE.

The city's comprehensive plan doesn't call for a big-box store there, Shey said.

Another easy call, he said, was the rejection of a Kum & Go convenience store at 2663 Mount Vernon Rd. SE, which neighbors opposed. An approval could have opened the door to commercial development deeper into the residential neighborhood, he said.

Then a few months later, the council approved a Kum & Go store closer to the downtown at 1420 Mount Vernon Rd. SE, over the objections of the principal and others at nearby McKinley Middle School.

'We heard a Parade of Horribles,' Shey recalled, but he said the new store has cleaned up an eyesore of a corner, brightened up the site, moved a sidewalk farther from busy Mount Vernon Road SE and put in a median berm to prevent dangerous turns.

Out on Blairs Ferry Road NE, Ken Bump said the SuperTarget store did do as promised and erected a berm with plantings and a fence, which he said 'kind of isolates the store from us. So we have accepted it.'

Roger Hadley, a Cedar Rapids architect, was on the City Planning Commission back in 2000 and 2001 and voted against the SuperTarget store. He said this week that he carried with him at the time 'quite a sympathy and a feeling of understanding for the little people, for homeowners who had their investments in their homes.'

Fourteen years later, though, he said he didn't see how all the development would unfold on Blairs Ferry Road NE.

'Maybe I could say I was somewhat naive of how the dominoes would fall,' he said.

Pam DeCarlo helped to lead neighbors back in 2001 and 2002 who questioned a proposed new Home Depot store at the site of the former Target store, 4501 First Ave. SE across from Lindale Mall. DeCarlo, whose neighborhood was above and behind the building site, was worried about truck traffic, 24-hour lighting and storm runoff.

The store opened in early 2003, and she and her husband remained neighbors until 2013, when they moved to a new home, but not because of Home Depot.

Her advice to other neighbors who want to fight city hall: 'Start digging. People go in and complain all the time. But if you don't know what the city's comprehensive plan says …

people need to read that.'

The 'right' decision

One-time SuperTarget opponent Ken Bump chuckled as he confided that he recently spent a little time sitting in his car in the SuperTarget parking lot looking across busy Blairs Ferry Road NE at the demolition of shuttered site of the former Nash Finch grocery distribution center to make way for more commercial development.

'I've been in my house some 40 years, and I could never see way back what would happen,' Bump said.

City Council member Shey said he has heard from a few who opposed the City Council decision in 2011 to close a stretch of Second Avenue SE to let Physicians' Clinic of Iowa build its new medical clinic on it. Keeping the clinic in the city in a new medical district connecting the two hospitals was essential, Shey said.

'In time, that decision will prove to be the right one. Even the naysayers will see,' he said.

l Comments: (319) 398-8312; rick.smith@thegazette.com