MEETING TOMORROW NIGHT !!

Please plan to attend the Morningside Lenox Park Association Zoning Committee meeting tomorrow night, Tuesday, January 8, at 7:30 pm at Morningside Presbyterian Church, 1411 N. Morningside Drive.

The Opus/Morningside project will be discussed and voted on by the committee at this meeting.

Negotiations with the developer have not been fruitful since the meeting in December. In fact, their proposal is worse than it was then and some could consider the recent actions by those associated with the developer as bad faith negotiating.

Opus Corporation now wants to allow the forested R-4 tract to be used as public space for the development, clear all underbrush and trees under 10 inches in diameter, regrade and re-landscape the first 50 feet of the R-4 tract nearest the project and construct utility facilities within the forest. They basically want their residents to be able to frolic in the forest that should be preserved as a buffer between the project and the neighborhood.

This is obviously unacceptable to the neighborhood for many reasons and on many levels.

The first anyone heard of this idea, which has NEVER been proposed at any of the countless meetings we have had in the last 6 months was a list a proposed conditions received from their lawyer 3 days ago. This tells us that these developers, knowing that keeping the forested R-4 tract intact is our number one priority and has been since day one, just don't care about what the neighborhood thinks or needs in order to live with this development.

Their plans also call for a 44 foot parking deck, which is a height 50 percent higher than what the neighborhood has proposed.

They have also proposed 70,000 square feet of retail space, up from the original 50,000 square feet.

In addition, they want to remove any requirement to make the rezoning conditional on a site plan. This would mean that once they get their tract rezoned, they could build whatever they want (within City ordinances) no matter what they had previously agreed to with the neighbors or anyone else. This is simply unacceptable to all of us who care about the Morningside neighborhood.

So, we now have a battle on our hands. A BIG one.

We are recommending that the committee take one of the following two actions tomorrow night:

1. Outright denial of the entire rezoning proposal, or,

2. Approval of the rezoning conditioned upon the list of conditions sent to the developers by Liz Coyle on December 13, 2007.

It is very important that as many neighbors as possible attend the meeting to make your voices heard and influence the committee's vote.

We hope to see all of you tomorrow night.