All Marion Belcher wanted was to go home.

Instead, he sat doing a slow burn on Wednesday morning, waiting for a dump truck part of 31st Street road reconstruction to get out of his way so he could make a left turn into Gaslight Village, 1900 W. 31st St.

For a half-hour, Belcher said, the truck blocked his access. As a result, he further choked traffic already clogged by the road work.

“Some workers tried to wave me on,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I live here. There’s no reason I should drive all the way to Louisiana to make a U-turn, just so I can make a right turn and still be blocked by a dump truck.

“I’m going to start raising a fuss.”

He wasn’t the only one complaining. Management at Gaslight Village, a 200-lot mobile home park, said they had received a half-dozen calls about blocked access.

Sherry Stone, Gaslight’s manager, said the city had never notified her that the park entrance would be unusable.

“It probably would’ve helped if we could’ve notified the tenants it was going to be like that,” she said.

Marion Belcher, who lives at Gaslight Village, 1900 W. 31st St., was on the phone most of the day Wednesday trying to get answers for why the entrance to the mobile home park was blocked by construction crews.

City Engineer Terese Gorman said the city probably should have notified the park the entrance would be blocked, even though such notification typically happens only with long-term closures.

“To be honest with you, 30 minutes isn’t that long,” she said. “But we probably should have told them.”

Even without a dump truck in the way, it’s not easy to drive 31st Street these days. The road has been narrowed from four to two lanes east of Iowa Street, where construction crews are rebuilding it to make way for a new Home Depot store.

“At lunchtime it wasn’t blocked like it was earlier, but it was still a poor excuse for an entrance,” Stone said.

That’s to be expected, Gorman said.

“There are going to be delays, consistently,” Gorman said. “I think you expect slowdowns for the next nine months. It’ll be inconvenient. If you have another choice, you should take it.”

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Belcher doesn’t have another choice if he’s to go home at night. He’s worried that fire trucks and ambulances might have an equally difficult time getting to Gaslight Village.

“That’s putting a lot of people in danger, and it’s only going to get worse,” Belcher said. “Trying to negotiate a turn is practically impossible.”

Gorman said that wouldn’t be a problem.

“If there’s an emergency vehicle, we’ll get out of the way,” she said.

That did little to satisfy Belcher. He wants to be able to leave and return home without hindrance.

“No one in the city,” he said, “has the power to shut down complete access to your home.”