By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
A neighbor of the Wood Bridge industrial park is tired of the site being unneighborly.
Lesley Riker wrote a letter to Bowling Green city officials this week expressing her exasperation with the stacked up industrial racks, the lack of promised trees to screen the site, and the truck traffic from one plant in particular.
Riker, of Riker Farm Seed on East Poe Road, feels the city has ignored her concerns.
In July, Riker went to the Bowling Green Zoning Board of Appeals to show photos of the view from her mother-in-law’s home across from the Vehtek plant. The racks were stacked up 40 feet high along Poe Ditch.
“I’m looking at that everyday,” Riker said at the meeting.
Now the industrial park is growing to the east, and another entrance is being added to the north along Poe Road – close to Riker’s home.
“It’s an eyesore,” she said. “We built in the country for a reason. It’s not country anymore.”
Riker cited declining property values, trash blowing into fields, and bright lights from the neighboring industries.
When the industrial park was first conceived, she said city officials promised to plant a screening of trees even before the businesses built. The majority of the trees that were planted along Vehtek’s northern edge have been killed by the racks pushing up against them, Riker said.
“That’s against city rules,” she said of the outside storage at the manufacturing plant. “So why has this been here ever since they’ve been here?”
However, the city has no rules barring outside storage at industrial sites, according to Bowling Green Planning Director Heather Sayler. So there is nothing the planning office can do about the towering racks.
That issue may be considered when the city overhauls its zoning code, Sayler said.
Sue Clark, executive director of Bowling Green Economic Development, has also tried to get Vehtek officials to clean up the site.
Clark told the Zoning Board of Appeals that a covenant for Wood Bridge Industrial Park does not allow outside storage.
“I remind them of that about once a month,” Clark said in July. “I’m becoming a professional nag.”
After being asked repeatedly by city officials to reduce the outside rack storage and improve parking availability for its more than 750 employees, Vehtek purchased a small property to the west of its plant for expansion of parking.
The only official who has been able to make headway with the company is Fire Chief Bill Moorman, who has been working with the plant management to improve safety on the site by getting rid of the racking, and by moving the parking away from the building so fire emergency vehicles can get close to the building when responding.
“Her concerns are not falling on deaf ears,” Assistant Municipal Administrator Joe Fawcett said on Wednesday. That includes Riker’s most recent concern about East Poe Road being closed down recently while another access was added to Vehtek. Riker said she received no notice of the closure.
“This is the busiest time of the year, with farming,” she said. Traffic could access the seed farm, but may have had to go a roundabout way.
Fawcett agreed that notification could have been handled better, but lines got crossed because multiple entities are working on the new access road – the city, state, economic development, and Wood County Port Authority.
“We’re trying to alleviate some of the issues in Wood Bridge as far as traffic goes,” Fawcett said.
Typically, city officials go door-to-door to notify neighbors of road closures, he said. But in this case, there was a miscommunication as to who would notify neighbors. Once the city was made aware of the lack of notice, Fawcett said a city engineer went out and spoke with Riker.
The project was further complicated since dual permits were needed for the roadway and for the culvert over Poe Ditch. The city is still waiting for the culvert approval from the Army Corps of Engineers, Fawcett said.
“We try to figure out what’s best for everybody,” he said. “It is our desire that the industrial parks and neighboring property owners can live in some sort of harmony.”
Riker pointed out the city’s plans to expand the industrial park to the south, with an access road then from Bowling Green Road East. That would make more sense, she said, than emptying so much traffic onto the rural Poe and Carter roads.
She sees this as a lack of planning on the city’s part. “It seems the city is just willy nilly wanting industrial growth without smart planning,” she wrote in her letter.
However, Fawcett said the city has planned for continued growth of the industrial park. An agreement is in place to acquire the property accessing Bowling Green Road East in the future – but as of now it does not own the land extending east of the Meijer store.
