A revised proposal for a senior living home near 37th and Calvert streets jettisoned by the City Council got a second thumbs-up from the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission on Wednesday but didn’t assuage concerns of neighbors.
“I want you to know we limited the number of people coming today because … we will contest it and go to the City Council,” said Trixie Schmidt, who lives about two blocks away. “Everyone who testified at the council and here for the previous (hearings), no one has changed their positions.”
Harbor Senior Care, a company based in Omaha and begun by Chris Gille and his sister Katie Hartman, wants to house 12 seniors with Alzheimer’s or dementia in the home that sits on a more than 1-acre lot.
They applied for a special permit previously, which the Planning Commission approved. The neighbors appealed the decision to the City Council, which voted 5-2 to reverse it.
People are also reading…
The council members who voted against it were most concerned about the number of residents that could live there and the fact that a special permit would stay with the home forever.
The revised proposal addressed those concerns, as well as others.
The changes in the revised proposal limit the number of residents at the home to 12 (the original proposal would have allowed for an expansion to house 16); add a detention pool if an engineer determines improvements will cause additional runoff; include additional landscaping as a screen around parking; and restrict the special permit so only assisted living and memory care facilities could be located there if the property is sold.
Gille told the Planning Commission that his sister approached him three years ago about finding a better way to offer care for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, to fill a gap between in-home care and institutional settings.
There are more than 30,000 such residential assisted living homes nationwide, Gille said, and they decided to create their own. They have another home in Lincoln near 84th Street and Pioneers Boulevard.
The homes offer a residential setting with fewer people who live as a family, Hartman said.
“This is an option for people who want more individual care,” she said. “Families are extremely happy with what we’re doing. It’s no different than having a big family living in a home.”
Harbor is currently targeting people who have the means to pay for their own care, but hope to expand to accept Medicaid clients, she said.
DaNay Kalkowski, the attorney representing Harbor, said they met with neighbors after the first proposal was rejected and revised the proposal based on feedback from that meeting and from testimony at the hearings.
The revisions mean the existing footprint of the home wouldn’t change, but they would add five parking spaces (in addition to two in an attached garage), an exterior walking path and fence, and they’d make the driveway a circle drive, Kalkowski said.
Ben Callahan, a city planner, said the lot is big enough that it could be subdivided into four single-family units, which could easily house the same number of people.
The neighbors who testified Wednesday had many of the same concerns as they did initially: parking, traffic, drainage they say already is a problem and that locating a business in a neighborhood is a bad idea.
The neighbors said they understood the need and believed the owners’ intentions were good, but thought it would change their neighborhood for the worse.
“It is placing a business in a neighborhood,” Schmidt said. “I don’t think that should happen in Lincoln, Nebraska. … It will affect the neighborhood, it will affect the people there. We will lose the quality that we have.”
Regina Blazek, who lives adjacent to 3737 Calvert St., said the age of the neighborhood means homes were built when there were different zoning requirements, so not all the streets have sidewalks, for instance. The area is also surrounded by schools, which increases traffic and means there are lots of children in the area.
Gille noted that he has seven children, six of whom drive, which means he’d create the same issues if he moved into the home.
The Planning Commission approved the revised special permit 6-0, and several commissioners complimented the Harbor owners for addressing neighbors’ concerns and said from the outside, it will continue to look like a single-family home. The owners said they will not add signs.
“I understand some of the concerns of neighbors,” said Commissioner Dick Campbell. “But I don’t consider this a business. It’s a home where people can live based on their needs.”