Fairmount Place: flood land sold for a song

1984 — 2009

The buyout: In 1984 the city spent $350,000 to buy seventeen homes along Fairmount Place, just north of the St. Marys River off Wells Street, and demolish them for flood protection. The flood-control apparatus on the ground — pumps and a sluice gate needing an electrical hookup — turned out to sit partly on the wrong side of the boundary with land owned by Dyle Hughes.

The sale and the resale: In 2002 the city sold the roughly three and a half acres to Hughes for $8,800 — "for a song," in the Journal Gazette's phrase, and, the paper's editorial said, completely under the public's radar. Five years later Hughes resold the land for $525,000 to the operators of the Rescue Mission and Charis House, for a new homeless shelter. The land was zoned industrial; the city's own zoning ordinance states that new residential uses are not permitted in industrial zoning, and neighbours appeared to have a case against the planners' assurance that a shelter could be built there. The property stands in a 500-year flood area, and much of it was under water in the week the Gazette wrote. The Maumee River Basin Commission's director put the flood objection on the record: "We wouldn't really advocate any type of construction there." A flood-control purchase, a mis-surveyed boundary, a quiet sale at two percent of the eventual price, and a shelter fight on land the river still claims — the Journal Gazette collected the whole course in 2009 under the title "A Flood of Missteps."

Sources:

1. Journal Gazette editorial series, "A Flood of Missteps," by Tracy Warner, March 2009 (collected at aroundfortwayne.com) — the 1984 buyout, the boundary error, the 2002 and 2007 sales, the zoning question and the Basin Commission's statement.