An Opinion Piece

by Joe Carter

Draft Version 1.0

As of 8/12/2022

10. Inconvenient Parking: As one prominent local citizen stated, “For a senior center, the parking lot is more important than the building.” Per a Council Member’s telling in the July 18 Special Council Meeting, the site will accommodate no more than 26 parking spaces, maybe fewer, adjacent to the building. Other parking is in a remote lot 150+ feet downhill to the southwest. The routes to/from the remote lots are sloped. (Note: Salt can’t be used to melt ice in bad weather anywhere in The Seniors Tree root zone or anywhere uphill in range of the root zone. Salt in its root zone will kill the tree.) At present, the old Senior Center accommodates 35 patrons on average each day, though not necessarily at the same time. The expectation is that patronage will increase in the new facility. To accommodate the expected patron volume, Seniors will frequently have to walk to/from the remote lot in all kinds of weather.

9. Traffic Congestion: Vine Street is a narrow residential thoroughfare. It is difficult for 2 cars to pass each other on the street. Seniors will have difficulty navigating it. According to the Council, the large meeting room at the center will accommodate 100 people. The number of cars necessary to transport 100 people to the site will create major traffic congestion on the narrow street. 

8. Takings of Private Propery: In a July 19, 2022 Council Committee Meeting (see discussion starting at the 43:45 point in the video) the Council finally acknowledged the traffic congestion issue at the Vine Street site. Their stated solution is to expand Vine Street into the front yards and driveways of the private homes on the west side of Vine Street. This will devalue those homes by reducing their driveways and front yards from 30 feet down to as little as 10 feet from the front door. The street expansion will also cost the City a lot of money. This expense has to be factored into the cost of construction at the site. The street expansion plus the private property condemnation cost plus private property devaluations will greatly exceed the $115,000 the City has sunk into the Vine Street location so far. There are plenty of alternate city owned properties that don’t have congestion issues requiring takings of private property.

7. Sewer Line Construction: Sometime during the first few months of new Senior Center operation on Vine Street, the City plans to route its main sewer line through the parking area north of the new building. Seniors will have to jockey with that construction work while it’s ongoing. 

6. Inefficient Building Configuration: To accommodate The Seniors Tree critical root zone, the building has been moved from 15 feet away to 35 feet away from the tree. It has been reconfigured from an efficient rectangular shape to a less-efficient L-shape. This retreat and reconfiguration is a step in the right direction for the tree, but it is suboptimal for the Senior Center. It reduces the risk to the tree, but it in no way eliminates the risk.

5. Flood Risk: The building pad is right on the edge of the FEMA-designated flood plain. It is built on 120 truck loads of fill dirt to get it above flood level. A long time resident of the neighborhood has seen floodwaters outside the FEMA mapped flood area. Flood waters have been in the exact location of the pad on multiple occasions. Since the floodplain is immediately adjacent to the river, currents could easily wash out portions of the pad during floodstage. FEMA maps are only 67% accurate. 1/3 of all flood disaster relief payments and 1/3 of all flood insurance payments go to cover properties located outside of high risk flood zones. See page 1, paragraph 3 of this document. It’s better to believe eyewitness accounts of past flood history than FEMA maps.

4. Possible Drainage Issues: The location may experience drainage issues because of the slope above the building pad. The natural contour of the site looks like it will gather runoff from over an acre above the pad and collect in a low point at the northwest corner of the pad near the base of the tree. There doesn’t appear to be any provision in the site engineering to get water from the low point at the northwest corner of the pad to the south and southeast side of the building along the direction of the slope. None of the usual solutions for handling drainage issues is available because they will result in root zone damage to the tree. Curbs, storm drains, trenching and major contour changes shouldn’t be implemented inside the critical root zone of the tree. A parking lot planned for the uphill side of the pad will further exacerbate water runoff issues.

3. Possible Building Code Enforcement Violations: The city required the townhouse development across the street to install an expensive stormwater drainage setup that routes water runoff around the building and into the Bosque River. It appears that they’re imposing no such requirements on the Senior Center developer, even though the site has a greater slope than the townhouse site. With regard to such matters, one ranking city official was heard to remark, “We’re the City. We can do whatever we want.” Tell that to the local developers they run through the building code gauntlet.

2. Site Constraints: The Vine Street building site has a major slope from northwest to southeast. It is a narrow strip hemmed in on the south by a large storm drain and a deep ravine. The Bosque River floodplain restricts access from the east. The 128 foot wide Seniors Tree root zone sits on the Northwest. These physical obstacles will complicate building at the site. Access to the site for construction crews is restricted. Options for placement of the parking lot, sidewalks, enclosed dumpster pad, garbage truck access lane, a covered drop-off lane, etc. are tightly constrained. Essentially, its junk as a building location. It should have been left as-is for parkland greenspace. It’s highly unlikely that the city would have allowed a private developer to build anything there if it were privately owned. (See City official’s comment above.) One gets the impression that the City said, “Hey, we have this backwater junk property on Vine Street. If we put the Senior Center there, we won’t have to use up one of our other more valuable properties. Plus, we can re-purpose the prized real-estate they occupy downtown.”

1. Risks to The Seniors Tree: The City’s initial plan was to build the Senior Center as a rectangular building whose northwest corner would be inside The Seniors Tree canopy about 15 feet from the trunk. An ISA-certified arborist rendered an opinion that the construction would most likely kill the tree within 5 years. The City then reconfigured the building into a less-efficient L-shape 35 feet away from the tree. This is a move in the right direction, but still well within the root zone of the tree. The tree is still very much at risk. It is showing signs of stress such as brances dying in the canopy. This stress so far is only from the fill-dirt of the building pad. Parking lots, sidewalks, trenches, curbs, a dumpster pad, a dumpster access lane, informal footpaths and all other impermeable or compacted surfaces will cause further problems.

11. There are better alternatives. The city owns at least 3 other vacant properties that have few, if any, of the problems listed above:

a. The parking lot behind the old Senior Center,

b. The Oncor lot at Floral and Mason Streets,

c. City Park locations.

The Oncor lot is especially well-suited to be a Senior Center location. Vine Street is a beautiful location. but once it’s built up, paved over and treeless, it won’t be.

Yes, that was 11 reasons. Shoot me.

12. Probable City Charter Violations. The Stephenville City Charter requires that all major building projects be included in the annual city budget. Before that can happen, the Charter requires that projects must be subjected to review in a public discussion. This $1+ million project was never reviewed by the public and its not in the approved annual budget. In our view, it's clearly in violation of the City Charter. A project to build a new Senior Center is a great idea, but this manifestation of it could be the poster child for failure to do things by-the-book. When you end-run the proper process, your also overlook finer details like parking, congestion, drainage, flooding and killing ancient trees. If the Senior Center project had gone through the proper legal process as required by the City Charter, the problems identified above could have been addressed before the project started, not after the location was torn up.

Okay, that’s 12 reasons. Shoot me again.