By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
The Reimagine Pleasant Street Project has Linda Budnick reimagining what her retirement will look, sound, and smell like.
Budnick lives in Westbrook Village on Cliff Overlook Road, and her back porch is only a few feet away from the south side of the path of the Pleasant Street project. She was concerned about how close the new road might be coming to her home when she reached out by email to Noblesville City Engineer Alison Krupski.
“I told her I had found out the road was going to be rather close to my porch and that for years we used it as a place to enjoy the birds and the woods,” Budnick told The Reporter. “I couldn’t afford to move. I’m just too old. I’m just not going to. The fumes from the cars – the noise – I’m really concerned about the noise. How will we sleep at night? How will we do anything?”
Budnick told The Reporter Krupski wrote back, saying she would meet with the owners of Westbrook Village, but that there was nothing she could do about pushing the path of the new road further north.
Westbrook Village is owned by the Spartz family. They own the land on both the north and south side of a long stretch of the path of the new road – land they will have to be compensated for as part of the eminent domain process before the road can be built.
Jason Spartz told The Reporter he has approached the City of Noblesville, offering to give them land at zero cost if they would change the angle of the new road slightly to push it another 30 to 50 feet away from the homes of his residents along Cliff Overlook Road.
According to Spartz, the city was not open to even discussing that option.
“Somebody needs to care about these residents,” Spartz told The Reporter. “Apparently, the mayor doesn’t. I’m offering them free land in an empty field at no cost to the city just to help the people who live in our manufactured housing community at Westbrook Village. At the end of the day, the residents here are my first and only concern in this. I do wonder where the road would have gone if these were million-dollar houses instead of manufactured homes, though.”
Spartz shared a noise evaluation report with The Reporter in which the city claims the noise levels will decrease once the road is built. This writer heard only birds and wind on the day he walked the path of the new road on Spartz’s land.
Building a road to alleviate downtown traffic and claiming it will be quieter than killdeer, starlings, and red-winged blackbirds seems unlikely.
When talking about how unopen the city is to the possibility of moving the road even a couple dozen feet north, Budnick said, “Maybe they’re just sadistic. I don’t know. It’s like, ‘what are you doing to us?’ They wouldn’t have to go that far.”
Budnick had her enclosed back porch added to the home at a cost of over $13,000. Now she is worried that the money spent on enriching her twilight years will have been wasted.
“I told her [Krupski], I said it will ruin my retirement years,” Budnick said. “I’m retired now, and I love sitting out there.”
While Budnick is not the only resident for whom the path of the Pleasant Street project is a quality-of-life concern, she is one who can barely stand between the city’s right-of-way and her own back porch.
Noblesville Planning Department and City Council continue to disappoint and think little about the long-term consequences of their decisions. Every time I read about a project they have approved and how little they have considered current residents, environmental impacts, and future repercussions, it’s like they’re trying to build a plane as they’re flying it.
It’s all over Hamilton County. The mayors are all in for themselves.