The Porter County Library presented plans for its Valparaiso branch parking lot expansion at the April 25 Site Review Committee meeting, but people from Valparaiso’s Central Neighborhood Association had concerns.
In an informal talk with City Administrator Bill Oeding and City Planner Tyler Kent after the meeting, seven neighbors said they felt a planned entrance to the lot off Michigan Street did not have to also have an exit and that putting both lanes in defeats the purpose of retaining the house at 1205 N. Michigan St.
The plans that landscape architect Michael Reese, of Mishawaka-based Troyer Group, presented showed the entrance would cut onto the land where the historic bungalow currently sits.
The neighborhood group and others have been working since fall 2015 against the destruction of the bungalow and the possible moving of it to another site, leaving just one home on the block.
Those at the meeting were fine with a one way exit or entrance on Michigan.
Robert Walsh, who lives at 107 N. Michigan, said he is willing to make concessions if the Library Board is, including on the required 25-foot buffer the library needs from his home to the parking lot.
“I think everybody could be happy,” Walsh said.
The plan would close the entrance and exit off Chicago Street and have the Michigan access and an exit/entrance off Franklin Street.
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It would increase the number of parking spaces in the lot in the now-empty lots on the northwest where shops and houses were, and the library hopes to start this summer.
However, the city officials had concerns about the lot, including the Michigan entrance, because of an island in the middle of it with a NIPSCO pole.
Reese said that NIPSCO said they cannot move the pole and a pole with a transformer west of what is now the exit of the one way alley that the city will vacate except for utility easements.
Public Works Director Matt Evans said the pole would impede pedestrians, especially the handicapped, and the neighbors said the pole in the middle of the entrance and exit would make plowing dangerous.
City officials also said that the library would either have to lose the 17th parking place on the north side or put an island in the middle that could take two places away, and the library needs to show plans for stormwater runoff from the rain garden.
Reese said he felt they could work with all the city’s requirements.
James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.