Resident questions CH government transparency over Taylor Road construction

As the bidding for the Taylor Road construction project began on July 21, at least one local resident was unhappy with the plans.

Douglas Whipple, a Taylor Road resident, is upset both by the fact that the planned renovations will not include extending the curb on the residential west side of the street and by what he believes was a lack of transparency by city officials in making the decision.

"Whenever the city is pummeled with a heavy snow, convoys of snowplows pile up three lanes of ice and snow across the narrow tree lawn that currently exists," Whipple wrote in a March editorial. "This creates an ongoing hazard for South Taylor residents and others who need to use the sidewalk—particularly children, the elderly and the disabled."

The tree lawns on South Taylor between Mayfield Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard are 52 inches wide, according to Richard Wong, planning and development director for Cleveland Heights—"pretty small," he said, but not extraordinarily so. Wong also said he thought the city was trying to figure out a way to reduce snow buildup on the sidewalks in the future.

Whipple said city officials changed the road construction plan to narrow the current seven-lane street. Initially, the plan called for narrowing it by a lane on each side instead of adding two lanes of curb space on the east side of the street, the outside of Severance Town Center.

In 2002, local residents picked a plan that would extend both curbs as the best choice for the neighborhood. "Through input at a public meeting, stakeholders chose [the proposal to add to both curbs] as the desired plan for this area," according to a city document Whipple obtained through a public information request in March. There has been no public hearing since, he noted.

Bonita Caplan, the CH council member who introduced the resolution to authorize the city manager to start putting the project in motion on June 20, said the plan was changed for practical reasons. "It would have been nice to put the land on [the west] side, but it is not financially feasible," she said. "It’s not gonna happen."

The biggest problem, Caplan said, are curb cuts—driveways and other paths to the street that need to be built around and extended into the narrowed road. With the crosswalks and entrances to Severance Center as the only curb cuts on the east side of the street, it is much easier to build there than it would be to work around the driveways on the residential west side. Caplan did not know how expensive that would be, but estimated that it would have added at least a million dollars to the project.

Other expenses that would be incurred by building on the west side include altering the sewer line and other infrastructure and lowering the uneven road so the driveways could reach the higher ground in what is now the middle, Caplan noted.

She said money is important even though the city is not paying any funds up front. (Money for the project is coming from various grants.) If the plans were changed at this point, "we would have to go to the back of the line again." That would mean several more years of driving on pavement that she called "the worst stretch . . . in the city," which would also cause further damage and make the project even more expensive down the road.

Caplan rejected Whipple’s March assertion that the plan was "conjured up behind closed doors." With the exception of confidential matters, "none of our meetings are closed-door," she said.

The lack of public input was not an attempt to disenfranchise citizens, but a reflection of the realities of the project, she said. After city officials learned that extending only the east side was the most practical way to go about it, they made the decision.

At the July 18 city council meeting, Whipple said the lack of opportunities for public input in the project is "the fundamental issue." He presented each council member with a series of questions, such as, "After the public and the city agreed that Concept C was the preferred road improvement design, should the city government have notified the public that it had decided to modify that design?" He said he hoped that one or two council members would take the time to give him answers. He has not yet received a single response, he said.

A January 2008 document from former Assistant to the City Manager Carl Czaga's office that Whipple obtained through a public information request acknowledged that the city was responsible for conducting a public meeting about the environmental impact of the project, which Whipple says has not happened. Caplan said she had no knowledge of the document or the need for the hearing.

A hearing will be held in August to discuss the specific plans for the construction, but that will not be a time for residents to say "We want this or we want that," Caplan indicated.

Whipple maintains that the public should have been notified when the plans for the construction changed and should now be presented with documented evidence of the unfeasibility of the initial plan.

"We’re being told it can’t be done," Whipple said. "We’re told to accept that on faith, and I don’t accept it on faith."