Residents of a southeast Greenwood neighborhood convinced the city council that a warehouse was not the right fit to be their neighbor.
The Greenwood City Council said no to rezoning nearly 100 acres at the southeast corner of Allen and Collins roads to light industrial from agriculture and suburban fringe. The proposal had been to build a large, speculative warehouse adjacent to an east-side neighborhood.
Four council members — Mike Campbell, Bob Dine, Linda Gibson and David Hopper — voted in favor of the rezoning.
But majority ruled, drawing cheers from a crowd of about 30 people who gathered in opposition of the proposal. Five council members shot it down — Bruce Armstrong, Ron Bates, Andrew Foster, Ezra Hill and Dave Lekse.
In May, the city’s Planning Commission gave the rezone a favorable recommendation by a vote of 7-2, saying it was likely the best and only use for the land.
During Monday night’s city council meeting, for the second time in two months, residents of the Homecoming at University Heights subdivision located across the street from the property showed up in droves to oppose the rezone. This time, their emotional pleas outweighed GLA Properties, LLC’s desire to build a massive warehouse that they did not have a tenant for. Such a building is known as a speculative warehouse.
It was another in a significant push for industrial development in east and southeast Greenwood. This development would have been located directly north of Pitney Bowes and east of the new Amazon facility in what the city has dubbed Greenwood Park at 65 South.
The subdivision was developed in the midst of a warehouse expansion in the early 2000s. In some cases, the backs of houses are located just 60 feet from these warehouses.
The developer argued that this proposed warehouse would be at least 120 feet from any homes, which is three-times the city’s requirement.
“We feel like we have gone to some lengths to shield them,” said Brian Tuohy, an attorney representing the developer.
The developer had already agreed to several commitments, including significant landscaping buffers between the development and neighborhood, road improvements and banning truck traffic on Allen Road, near the entrance to the subdivision. Instead, they would require trucks use a back or side entrance to the facility.
They added to that list Monday night, agreeing to relocate loading docks to the opposite side of the warehouse, farthest from the neighborhood, install 8- to 10-feet tall sound barriers — possibly a stone wall — as well as light deflectors, a push by council member Linda Gibson.
“I don’t understand why we don’t require that up front when that planning is going on, but we don’t. It is something I have been pushing for two or three years, but so far, I haven’t been heard. But I can tell you that the lighting needs to have deflectors on it,” Gibson said.
But the developer’s many commitments weren’t enough to sway residents or a majority of the city’s top decision makers.
“I voted for the Amazon project, because A, It was Amazon, and B, Indy was still in the running for (the company’s) HQ2,” Lekse said. “With zoning requests, I’m more than likely to go along with those, but I’m not seeing any compelling reason for us to change the zoning on this hundred-acre plot of ground.
Once we change it, they build a warehouse and that’s it forever … When we sit up here and make zoning changes, we have to think, ‘What will people say about this in 30 years?’”
He also pointed to the city’s comprehensive plan, which about 12 years ago laid out how the city’s leaders wanted Greenwood to take shape during the next 20 years.
“The comprehensive plan is supposed to provide some sense of certainty about what the land across the street is going to look like, and in this case, it’s suburban fringe, not light industrial,” Lekse said.
The developer argued, again, that land is surrounded by warehouses, and that these residents chose to live in that community knowing that, in general, it was an industrial area.
Sanjivan Bual gathered more than 200 signatures on a petition opposing the rezone. He spoke during the Planning Commission meeting; he spoke again Monday night.
He was concerned for his kids’ safety. He was also concerned that if Greenwood officials continue to offer incentives to companies building warehouses, more and more will come.
Other concerns included decreased property values, increased truck traffic on narrow, already congested roads, bright lighting and significant noise.
Kathy McKee, who has lived in the same house on Griffith Road for 24 years, said you can hear the trucks well into the night and early morning, beating and banging at all hours, tires blowing on occasion. In the wintertime, the diesel fumes are unbearable, she said.
“We’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, but none as destructive as what has happened on the east side of Greenwood, or the ‘warehouse trail’ as I like to call it,” McKee said.
“This council needs to understand that we live there.”
Jeffrey Hart, a trucker who lives in the neighborhood, argued the roads in the area are not equipped for that amount or type of traffic, especially semi traffic, and that he worries about his elderly neighbors who walk to a nearby temple to worship.
“We’re not impacting a company so much as we are our neighbors and future generations,” said Randy Goodin, who doesn’t live in the area, but has led the charge against industrial development in southeast Greenwood for years.
Commission member Matthew Smith, who voted against the rezone as a member of the planning commission, was asked during the council meeting to explain why. He said he voted against it because there is no practical reason to assume the council would absolutely reject a multi-family development on that land, which is zoned for residential, simply because they have not been keen on multi-family developments in the past. That assumption is political, he said.
