To the editor:
A front-page article in the Echo Press Friday, March 27 described a planned 75-unit apartment building and parking lot for the corner of Nokomis and Second Avenue to be built by a developer who lives in Nebraska and has no connection to Alexandria except a lake home. This building, its tenants and its significant vehicular traffic will be shoehorned into a Ward 3 family-centered neighborhood of single-family dwellings that has known peace, quiet and safe streets for decades.
Local residents were not informed about any of this until a few days before the Planning Commission met on March 16 to vote. Only those who lived within 350 feet of the development were informed. But several of those people were away for the winter and unable to come to the public hearing. Even then, only 10 were allowed into the public comment portion. Despite our pleas to delay the vote, the committee approved it unanimously.
We discovered afterwards that the project would be on the City Council agenda just one week later. Several people sent letters to our representative asking to delay any discussion until the missing residents were back home and we could articulate our concerns. However, at that meeting, City Council unanimously rubber-stamped the project, saying that our concerns had been addressed at the Planning Commission meeting. The episode had the appearance of speeding the process through approval in order to pre-empt any organized local response.
Clearly public input into the plans of our elected city leaders is not considered important. Only the people living in a community have deep knowledge of the virtues of their neighborhood that are worth preserving, as well as problems that will be made worse by certain kinds of development. Yet our opportunities for input were treated shabbily. We did not ask for this confrontation but it has been delivered to our doorsteps.
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Bonnie Beresford
Alexandria, MN
