To the editor:

In light of the City Commission’s Dec. 19 vote, and before another Town Talk article is written about the virtues of Mike McGrew’s Fall Creek Villas development and its unhappy neighbors, can you report on why this plan failed in all three previous commission (city and planning) votes? It appears that the developer and city planners, in their effort to quickly approve, didn’t consider all the physical and legal requirements until concerned residents showed them what they missed. Inquiring commissioners then voted correspondingly.

Can you report about the now nonexistent, affordable housing consideration that was first touted as why this plan needed to be approved? Ask why it’ll take five years to build a mere 14 houses and how that solves our housing problem. Ask if there’s written permission from Evergy to consider their right-of-way as part of the development’s “recreation” area. Ask why they haven’t added water runoff calculations from Hidden Lane’s new culvert that this plan makes flow directly into Deerfield Creek at a point where neighbors’ yards already flood.

These are the things we need to know. Not again about how wonderful these small, crammed together, $450K-plus per unit duplexes with no yard will be for Lawrence. Not again about how this plan helps fix Lawrence’s immediate housing crisis. And certainly not again about Lawrence residents questioning things that should have been addressed from the beginning.

David Swanson,

Lawrence