COUNCIL: Missed historic opportunity

In 1984 I bought two rundown cottages in the Fort Grounds as a home and investment. I have remodeled, reroofed, added on and repaired those houses for 30 years and have a very nice historic 1906 home. These homes are not large, and the economic reality in the Fort Grounds is that this house and its neighbor are scrapers. They will be replaced with lot line to lot line structures, maybe attractive, maybe not.

The City Council was bombarded with Norman Rockwell images of single family bliss to effectively remove the R8 zoning of the area by adding a restrictive single family overlay. This is not going to save the Fort Grounds’ historic character.

What it will do is reduce the tools my family had in place when I invested in the Fort Grounds. As a blue collar worker without a huge pension or grand portfolio I was shocked that the City Council would override Planning and Zoning’s wise decision not to take away property rights.

Twenty or 30 years from now, this decision could be the difference between my wife and I being comfortably taken care of or stuck in a government-run Medicaid facility.

RANDY BELL

Coeur d’Alene