AC-T Guest commentary (+CAN Editorial Comment TBD)

Three celery stalks to the Asheville Citizen-Times for shining its editorial light on GreenLife.

The Green-Life operation is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde garden of good and evil. It provides organic, healthy lifestyle choices inside, while its Maxwell Street neighbors are being unconscionably victimized by their own city government and GreenLife’s operating policies, caused by a loading dock location that violated city ordinances from the first day GreenLife opened, and continues to be in violation over three years later.

Truck traffic

How would you like your home with tractor-trailer trucks continually rumbling down the street, air-brakes shattering the atmosphere, nerve-wracking back-up beeping, and the unloading process taking place at all hours? You would angrily call the police, and you would be within your legal rights, because big rigs are not allowed on residential streets in the City of Asheville.

Well, for over three years Maxwell Street residents have endured hundreds of big rigs pounding their residential street with no action from city government to enforce the law.

GreenLife’s loading dock previously functioned as part a former A&P store. In 1997 the city adopted the UDO (Unified Development Ordinance), which makes truck access to the GreenLife loading dock via Maxwell Street illegal.

Moreover, the truck traffic generated by the former A&P store was in a period of mainly canned and packaged food products. GreenLife’s wildly successful operation is dependent on frequent fresh produce deliveries, often made by tractor-trailers, which can only access the loading dock during store hours via Maxwell Street.

Solutions

There are really only two possible solutions open to GreenLife: (1) have tractor-trailer deliveries go to a refrigerated offsite staging dock, and then redeliver the shipment in a six-wheel truck to GreenLife; (2) expand its successful store in another location.

One can readily appreciate the quandary that the city finds itself in, but to drag its feet for over three years is unconscionable negligence.

Rather than enforcing the law on behalf of the Maxwell Street homeowners, the city has repaired sidewalk damage caused by the tractor-trailers making deliveries to GreenLife at taxpayer expense, and City Council is now considering spending $40,000 of taxpayers’ money to install traffic calming measures on Maxwell Street that will merely amount to a bump in the road and solve nothing.

As another remedy, the acting city planning director has proposed to City Council that GreenLife be required to install an extensive landscape buffer to stop delivery trucks from using Maxwell Street. This proposal could be an ideal solution for the residents, if skillfully designed, which could convert Maxwell Street into sort of park-side neighborhood along a narrow greenbelt while blocking tractor-trailer trucks from entering, and effectively screening off the GreenLife loading dock. But, then, on the GreenLife side, tractor-trailers are left with no maneuvering room to back into the loading docks.

GreenLife installed a landscape buffer with a 6-foot high grapestake fence required by the city to shield arriving tractor-trailers from view, which did nothing to abate the noise and screens the big rigs from view as effectively as cafe curtains hide an elephant.

GreenLife, from a retail standpoint, is a wonderful store inside, and a very popular shopping experience. But no shopper entering GreenLife would be willing to endure the hell of living on Maxwell Street, nor would any City Council member.

City has options

The city has powerful enforcement options at its disposal for corrective action. But at the end of the day, whatever action the city finally imposes on GreenLife, there is no win-win solution.

GreenLife got itself into its own untenable situation, or rather, was allowed to get into it, by city officials approving GreenLife’s plans to take over the A&P store without modifications that the UDO required.

One wonders if the district attorney reads the Asheville Citizen-Times? The over three-year ordeal that the Maxwell Street residents have been put through borders on the legal definition of culpable, and possibly, criminal negligence, which perhaps the district attorney should review on behalf of the Maxwell Street citizens to determine any potential wrongdoing, or imprudent acts, to warrant a grand jury hearing.

The AC-T’s next published “Report Card” should assign a “F” to the city for failing to enforce its existing laws, and miserably failing the residents of Maxwell Street as a responsible government chartered by its taxpayers (including Maxwell Street, who too, are taxpayers.)

Robert L. Malkin is a former government planner and landscape architect. He may be contacted at ashevillecitizenvoices.com.