Growing pains: Is Franklin getting too big to selectively enforce ordinances?

This will be the background post, with more to follow.

This past Tuesday's Franklin Common Council meeting focused on a letter written by Lyle Sohns, 5th district alderman, to Mayor Tom Taylor regarding what he alleges is the city's willingness to ignore ordinance violations on the Fox property, which bisects the area where developers are struggling to create a cohesive commercial site called Fountains of Franklin. Trouble is, as long as the Foxes refuse to sell their property, the Fountains of Franklin site will be hopelessly severed in two with Rawson Avenue on one side and a residential subdivision on the other; both immovable objects.

As per typical oddball suburban road plans, there is no way, given the Fox property's location, to move from one end of the proposed F of F site to the other without getting back out onto Rawson and driving the 500 yards-or-so. Wonderful - see why good master planning is important?

It's my understanding that various financial offers have been made to the Foxes by the developer to purchase the property, but the Foxes prefer not to sell. You can imagine the developer's frustration.

Why not sell? It's not for us to judge why people grow attached to a certain location, but the Foxes apparently want to stay put on a strip of land that abuts a road thickly populated with noisy, dusty dump-truck traffic from the quarry across the street. To their left and right will soon be commercial development of one sort or another that does not compliment their current storage and concrete business (and vice-versa).

Add to this stew a few visits to the Foxes from a competing developer with a competing commercial development in Shoppes at Wyndham Village (and who, ironically, maneuvered the city into a similar "don't-take-our-land" position and is responsible for the fact that there is a house (!) right behind the Target loading dock. Well played, Mr. Carstensen!)

Now we come to find out that the Foxes have been taking certain liberties - - unknowingly, I assume - -  with their property that conflict with local ordinances, and these ordinances have not been enforced, hence the letter from alderman Sohns to the mayor. Three businesses - a concrete company, mini-warehousing, and outdoor storage - are operated on the property. Two out of three of the businesses have never been approved; sort of a "look the other way" situation, because, after all, Franklin was but a small town back in 1980 when the unapproved businesses began operation.

During the public comment period at Tuesday's Common Council meeting, the Foxes - - clearly distraught - - expressed their fear and confusion over the matter. You'd have to be made of stone not to empathize with them; I sincerely doubt they ever consciously set out to pull the wool over the city's eyes. (In their own words; "We're not developers.") They say they had a lawyer involved but have since dropped him or her as the lawyer "seemed to only make things worse and more confusing for us."

So who's to blame for their predicament? And, make no mistake, it very definitely is a predicament if Franklin hopes to enforce any other ordinance with any other business or homeowner. Everybody's watching.

More later. In the meantime, listen to meeting podcasts at Janet Evans' Righty Blog (where you will hear the phrase "emminent domain" for no reason I can discern).

Comments

[Bryan Maersch]

John

The theme of Mayor Taylor's "answer" to Alderman Sohns (Mayor Taylor kept referring him as Sohns out of disrespect even after the Alderman corrected him) was redirection. As Alderman Olson stated, Alderman Sohns nor anyone on the council brought up eminent domain to remove the Fox's from their land.

One can only hope that the Mayor is not following in the steps of Basil Ryan in the disrespectful way council members were treated back then, including himself.

When pressed about the claims of eminent domain, Taylor stammers, well some constituents are contacting me about protecting the Fox's from the city.

[John Michlig]

Politics with a capital "P."

Count on the next developer facing code violations to bring this up.